Shedding light on AIDS and HIV

Date: Mar 17 2000 (712 lines)
Copyright 2000 by John S. James;
permission granted for non-commercial use.
AIDS TREATMENT NEWS #339, March 17, 2000
phone 800-TREAT-1-2, or 415-255-0588
CONTENTS: [items are separated by "*****" for this display]
** Treatment Models from India: Interview with Shashank
Joshi, M. D.
An HIV specialist in India describes an evolving standard of
care, when only a few patients can afford the antiviral
regimens common in richer countries. Dr. Joshi's approach
include nutritional support for the immune system,
intermittent HAART for some, herbal treatment, de-worming,
and sometimes drugs to reduce intestinal inflammation and
therefore possibly lower viral load.
** Testosterone Cream Available at CPS; Gel Approved by FDA
A major HIV-specialist pharmacy is now carrying a compounded
testosterone cream for topical application, avoiding the
shots or patches otherwise used to deliver this drug.
Meanwhile, the FDA has approved a testosterone gel -- but this
gel will not be widely available for several months.
** Anabolics, Exercise, Nutrition, Supplements: New Book
Available
BUILD TO SURVIVE, by the editors of the newsletter
MEDIBOLICS, discusses anabolic steroids, exercise, nutrition,
and supplements for preventing or treating muscle wasting in
AIDS.
** Vaccine News, March 2, 2000
Much is happening to accelerate development of vaccines,
especially for AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. Major
initiatives were announced at a meeting of the President's
Millennium Vaccine Initiative, March 2 at the White House.
** Fluconazole: Pfizer Asked to Lower Africa Price
Pfizer, Inc. 's fluconazole costs almost 15 times as much in
South Africa, where it is patent protected, than in Thailand
where it is generic. The result is that many Africans die of
cryptococcal meningitis and other fungal infections because
they cannot obtain the patented drug at Pfizer's price. In
South Africa, a coalition of major organizations has asked
Pfizer to either reduce the price to the Thailand level, or
voluntarily license the patent so that the treatment could be
made available.
** Dietary Supplement Regulation: FDA Public Hearing April 4,
Written Comments Due May 4
Problems in how the U.S. regulates "foods" vs. "drugs" could
eventually block access to low-cost and natural treatments.
** FDA Drug-Approval Background: New Web Pages
An FDA Web site explains the details of how drugs are
regulated.
** African Americans and AIDS: Highlights of 2nd Annual
Washington Conference
Treatment and prevention experts look at how to respond to
the epidemic among African Americans, who are much more
likely than whites to have HIV and AIDS.
*****
Treatment Models from India: Interview with Shashank Joshi,
M. D.
by John S. James
Shashank R. Joshi, M. D., president of the HOPE
Foundation in Mumbai, India, is an HIV specialist in a
public hospital system with more than 36,000 patients with
HIV; in addition, he follows over 500 HIV patients in his
private practice, and more than 180 HIV-discordant couples.
We asked Dr. Joshi to share information and experiences that
might be useful to physicians or patients elsewhere.
An Evolving Standard of Care in India
AIDS TREATMENT NEWS: How to you approach HIV care in
India, where few patients have access to triple-drug
combination antiretroviral treatment?
Dr. Joshi: We are developing low-cost treatment models
in the Indian population, because of the high cost of
antiretroviral drugs.
A few of my private patients can afford some triple
therapy with a protease inhibitor and two nucleoside
analogs, but not continuously. So for some patients, we
suggested triple therapy on alternate months, one month on a
HAART combination and the next month without
antiretrovirals. At the end of a year we have a small
cohort of 26 patients who have done very well on this
treatment; all of them have undetectable viral load -- below
20 copies on the Roche Ultrasensitive test -- and their
average CD4 count has improved. It is important to note
that all of these patients started this regimen with a CD4
count over 300. NIH is critically looking at this cohort.
We are now trying to validate these results, and are working
with other researchers, including in the U.S.
We are looking at other low-cost models as well. We do
not have ddI in India, so often I use d4T, 3TC, and
hydroxyurea, in an antiretroviral-naive population. [Note:
Hydroxyurea, an inexpensive drug usually used in cancer
treatment, may improve the activity of certain
antiretrovirals, especially ddI -- but can also increase the
toxicity of the regimen.] This combination is working very
well in a small but significant number of cases, reducing
viral load and inducing CTL responses. Significantly, we
have had no mitochondrial toxicity in these patients --
perhaps because we are giving them appropriate
immunonutrition, including multivitamins, antioxidants, and
certain other micronutrients. This nutritional therapy may
be particularly important in the Indian population, because
wasting is a major problem. [Note: Some researchers believe
that mitochondrial toxicity -- a condition recognized
elsewhere in medicine -- may caused by nucleoside analog
drugs -- and may be responsible for much of their toxicity,
as well as some but not all of the body-shape changes often
attributed to protease inhibitors.]
We are planning to study the product ImmunoCal, a
nutritional supplement derived from whey protein, as a
source of glutathione. It is believed that mitochondrial
toxicity, which the nucleoside analog drugs and hydroxyurea
may have, is mediated through the glutathione pathway. If
you give patients a natural source of glutathione, maybe
this problem can be prevented, and you may not see the liver
toxicity, lactic acidosis, or other problems which might
otherwise occur. We want to see if improved nutrition can
improve the catabolic cachexia [wasting], and also we want
to look for any antiretroviral effect. I understand that a
small but significant number of patients have dropped their
viral load by a log, after treatment with nutritional
regimens designed to support the immune system.
So an evolving standard of care in India is that we
offer patients antiretroviral therapy with two nucleoside
analogs and a protease inhibitor; if they cannot afford
that, they can try structured treatment interruption, one
month on and one month off of the triple therapy; if they
cannot afford that, we look into an option like d4T and 3TC
and hydroxyurea. In any case, treatment includes
multivitamins and antioxidant supplements, psychological
support, and meditation and yoga.
Our protocol always includes vitamin E and vitamin C.
We try to get the vitamin E from natural sources; we do not
use the synthetic pills because they are derived from
petrochemical intermediates, and some believe that these
preparations might be pro-oxidant as well as antioxidant.
So we use extracts from wheat germ, usually 200 IU to 400
IU. We also include B-complex vitamins, selenium, and other
minerals.
Herbal Treatments for Antiretroviral or IL-2 Effects
Dr. Joshi: We are also using certain herbal
medications -- some of which increase the body's natural
production of IL-2. We presented a poster on this approach
in 1998, at the 12th World AIDS Conference in Geneva
["Effect of unique herbal formulation in Indian HIV
patients: A pilot study," 12th World AIDS Conference,
Geneva, June 28 - July 3, 1998, abstract #42385]. We have
compiled an herbal booklet, listing each ingredient, with
references to studies showing antiviral activity, or
increases in the natural production of IL-2.
De-Worming, and Other Treatment for Intestinal Inflammation
Dr. Joshi: We are also giving a weekly dose of
albendazole to patients who have intestinal parasites. We
have seen that if we de-worm patients routinely, after six
months to a year there is a reduction of viral load. Indian
patients traditionally have higher viral set points than
European patients; this might be related to the parasites.
Deworming might assist mucosal immunity in the gut, and
improve the CTL response against HIV. Also, in a couple of
patients, I am trying mesalamine, a drug used to reduce
intestinal inflammation.
Side Effects of Antiretroviral Regimens
Dr. Joshi: We have not had problems with mitochondrial
toxicity -- perhaps because of our nutritional therapy, or
perhaps because we do not have ddI in India. I also believe
that immunonutrition helps to some extent with
lipodystrophy.
But we are seeing lipodystrophy. And we are also
seeing other side effects which have been reported
elsewhere, including osteoporosis, and aseptic necrosis of
the femur, in people on protease-inhibitor regimens in
India. So there is considerable concern about these drugs,
and we are looking at PI-sparing regimens. Nevirapine is
now available in India, and we will be using it for this
purpose.
*****
Testosterone Cream Available at CPS; Gel Approved by FDA
by John S. James
On March 2 the Community Prescription Service, a mail-
order pharmacy associated with POZ magazine and specializing
in HIV, announced that it is selling a compounded
testosterone cream. This product is not generally available
in pharmacies. ("Compounded" means that it is specially
prepared by a pharmacist at the direction of a physician,
not a packaged pharmaceutical product; compounded products
do not have to pass most of the FDA requirements for
approval of pharmaceuticals.) Topical testosterone has long
been available (see Testosterone Cream and Gel Available;
Prices Vary Greatly," AIDS TREATMENT NEWS #307, November
20, 1998), but usually only through certain pharmacies which
specialize in compounding.
With the CPS product, the physician specifies the
starting dose per application, and the cream is made up
accordingly. According to CPS, for most people, an
appropriate starting dose is 12.5 mg of testosterone per
application. The same controlled-substance regulations
apply to topical testosterone as to the injected or patch
forms of the drug.
For more information about this testosterone cream,
call CPS at 800-842-0502.
Note: On February 29 Unimed Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
announced that the FDA had approved its AndroGel(TM) 1%
testosterone gel "for replacement therapy in males for
conditions associated with a deficiency or absence of
endogenous testosterone" -- the first time the FDA has
approved such a product. However, AndroGel is not expected
to be widely available in pharmacies until mid summer.
Apparently AndroGel will deliver a somewhat higher dose of
testosterone than the CPS cream.
Comment: We expect that the main practical difference
between the products is that the AndroGel will be much more
expensive.
*****
Anabolics, Exercise, Nutrition, Supplements: New Book
Available
by John S. James
BUILD TO SURVIVE, by AIDS treatment advocates Michael
Mooney and Nelson Vergel, covering anabolic steroids,
exercise, nutrition, and popular supplements (especially for
preventing or treating HIV-related wasting), was published
February 2000. Mooney and Vergel are also editors of the
MEDIBOLICS newsletter, http://www.medibolics.com
The book includes sections on AIDS wasting, BIA
(bioelectrical impedance analysis), testosterone replacement
therapy, different kinds of anabolic steroids, legality of
anabolic steroids in medicine, lipodystrophy and potential
approaches for management, side effects and guidelines for
anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, orthomolecular
nutrition, popular food supplements, various diet plans,
food safety, diarrhea, blood tests to use before starting a
nutritional program, exercise programs, recommended reading,
references, and testimonials.
BUILT TO SURVIVE is published by PoWeR (Program for
Wellness Restoration), a nonprofit organization founded by
Nelson Vergel. The cover price is $24.95, but copies can be
ordered from the Houston Buyers' Club, 1-800-350-2392, for
$18.95 +3.95 shipping; the book is also available through
http://www.amazon.com , which can ship internationally.
Comment
BUILT TO SURVIVE provides an accessible overview of
certain important therapies, by advocates who have made
themselves experts in this area. Some of the
recommendations may be controversial, and we are not
qualified to judge their medical appropriateness. We
suggest this book as a source of ideas that you may later
want to discuss with your physician -- a discussion which
the authors repeatedly urge their readers to have.
*****
Vaccine News, March 2, 2000
Several major vaccine announcements were made on March
2, at a conference on the President's Millennium Vaccine
Initiative in the White House:
* The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) will
invest $10 million this year to help fund the development of
six HIV vaccine candidates for developing countries. IAVI,
funded by foundations and governments, establishes
partnerships with industry using a "social venture capital"
approach: in return for investment, IAVI secures rights to
ensure that a successful vaccine will be available to
developing countries at a reasonable price.
* Pharmaceutical corporations announced donations of
millions of doses of existing vaccines to developing
countries; four major companies promised to speed research
and development of vaccines for AIDS and malaria, which
currently have no vaccines. Also, Clinton has proposed a
billion-dollar tax credit over ten years to speed
development of vaccines for HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria,
and a $50 million contribution for a global vaccine bank.
* The U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases released THE JORDAN REPORT 2000, on the state of
development of vaccines for many diseases; 8 pages of the
173-page report summarize the current status of several
current approaches to an AIDS vaccine, but other sections
are also relevant. THE JORDAN REPORT 2000 is available at
www.niaid.nih.gov; more information on NIAID's role in AIDS
vaccines is at http://www.niaid.nih.gov/aidsvaccine
* The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization
(GAVI) is a major government/industry/foundation alliance to
get existing and new vaccines to poor countries. According
to GAVI, vaccines save about three million children's' lives
every year -- but almost three million other children die
each year because they were not vaccinated. For more
information, see http://www.vaccinealliance.org
* New vaccine bills introduced in Congress: On March 1
Senator John Kerry (D., Massachusetts) and two others
introduced the Vaccines for the New Millennium Act of 2000
in the Senate, and Representative Nancy Pelosi (D., San
Francisco) and nine others introduced it in the House.
[Rep. Pelosi had previously introduced the Lifesaving
Vaccine Technology Act of 1999 to provide a tax credit for
research and development of vaccines for HIV, tuberculosis,
and malaria; President Clinton had instead proposed a fund
to purchase these vaccines after they were developed, which
incidentally would not cost the government money now. The
new Kerry/Pelosi bill combines several ideas and includes
both approaches.]
*****
Fluconazole: Pfizer Asked to Lower Africa Price
by John S. James
On March 13 the Nobel prize winning medical
organization Doctors Without Borders/Medicins Sans Frontiers
(MSF) demanded that Pfizer, Inc. greatly reduce the price of
fluconazole in poor countries, in a communication delivered
to the company in 18 countries (Pfizer is headquartered in
New York). Doctors Without Borders supported South Africa's
AIDS-activist Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which on the
same day organized a delegation of union leaders, church
leaders, and others representing millions of South Africans
asking that Pfizer either lower the price, or grant a
voluntary license allowing TAC to import the drug or
manufacture it locally, with a 5% royalty to Pfizer.
According to MSF, fluconazole costs almost 15 times as
much in South Africa, where it is patent protected, than in
Thailand, where it is not (in U.S. currency, $17.84 in
Africa for an adult's daily maintenance dose, which must be
taken indefinitely, vs. only $1.20 at the generic price in
Thailand). The African price is more than twice the average
daily wage of employed South Africans.
The consequence is that few Africans are treated for
cryptococcal meningitis, and as a result their life
expectancy is less than one month. Patients who are treated
can live for years with a greatly improved quality of life.
Many Africans could be treated if they could obtain the drug
at the generic price.
According to TAC, Pfizer in South Africa agreed to
respond within one week as to how TAC's letter was being
handled -- although it could not act on the issue itself
within a week, as the decision would have to be made in the
United States.
Letter from Archbishop
The Most Reverend Njongonkulu Winston Hugh Ndungane,
Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, wrote the following to the
chairman and CEO of Pfizer, Inc.:
"Dear Mr. Steere,
"In the face of evidence to the effect that it is
possible to manufacture and sell Fluconazole at a price
affordable to a significant number of South Africans,
we urge you, in the interest of justice, to make this a
reality.
"We do understand that Pfizer is neither a charitable
nor a humanitarian organization and that you have a
responsibility to your shareholders. We assume,
however, that Pfizer's market share in our country
warrants an interest in our economic and social
stability -- both of which are acutely threatened by
our AIDS pandemic.
"Many so called "First World" institutions and
corporations are busy taking out patents on every new
intellectual idea and discovery in every field. The
poor are continually being excluded from benefits of
these discoveries and will continue to be so until some
sense of global responsibility is introduced.
Creativity is needed to bridge the huge gap between
human need, scientific effort and market returns.
"Both rich and poor need to direct their attention
towards a common plan of action regarding mobilization
of science and technology for poor country problems.
One recent suggestion is the creation of a vaccine fund
which would guarantee future markets for epidemic
vaccines.
"Besides the bottom line issues, we strongly urge you
to consider these humanitarian and moral aspects.
"Grace and Peace,"
*****
Dietary Supplement Regulation: FDA Public Hearing April 4,
Written Comments Due May 4
by John S. James
On April 4 the FDA will hold a public hearing on
regulation of claims for dietary supplements. While the
technical issues involved do not directly affect AIDS
treatment access, they are part of a larger issue which
does. Anyone wishing to speak at this hearing must register
in writing by March 28. But written comments can be
submitted until May 4.
The hearing is to get public input on how the FDA
should change its regulations in response to a court case
which it lost. An appeals court held that "the First
Amendment [of the U.S. Constitution] does not permit FDA to
reject health claims that we [FDA] determine to be
potentially misleading unless we also reasonably determine
that no disclaimer would eliminate the potential deception"
[FDA's summary in the FEDERAL REGISTER, March 16].
For background and more information, see "Food
Labeling; Dietary Supplement Health Claims; Public Meeting
Concerning Implementation of Pearson Court Decision and
Whether Claims of Effects on Existing Diseases May Be Made
as Health Claims," FEDERAL REGISTER, March 16, 2000 [page
numbers not available as this article goes to press].
Comment
The larger issue is the regulation of "dietary
supplements," such as the herbal products which are widely
sold in the U.S. in health-food stores, and now in
mainstream drugstores as well. There is widespread
agreement that more regulation is needed than exists today.
The appropriate kind of regulation is unclear.
The danger is that we will get the wrong kinds of
regulation, just because the models are most readily
available. If natural products become regulated like
pharmaceutical drugs, most will be effectively banned since
no company will pay for the large clinical trials which
would be necessary for approval.
Even worse is the war-on-drugs model, which for decades
has had a major impact on medicine in denying appropriate
pain relief, because doctors reasonably fear trouble even
when their prescribing is entirely legitimate and legal.
The drug war has also greatly hindered the appropriate use
of anabolic steroids in treating wasting, which causes many
AIDS deaths -- and greatly impeded the use of needle
exchange, although it has been clearly shown to prevent HIV
infection without increasing drug use.
Fortunately there are more positive regulatory models
from some European countries -- which have long allowed the
sale of a large variety of natural products at reasonable
prices, under effective but not prohibitive controls.
The U.S. is prone to destructive "moral" crusades --
which is why we have both the drug war, and the new mass
imprisonment of the last 20 years. Because of the
difficulty of making anything happen, this destructive
spirit may be used as an ally by persons and institutions
seeking legitimate safety measures for natural health
products. Anyone interested in access to inexpensive or
natural treatments should be paying attention at this time.
*****
FDA Drug-Approval Background: New Web Pages
by John S. James
The FDA recently launched an excellent Web site with
detailed release:
The information includes:
-Drug Approval Application Process. An overview from test
tube to marketing
-Investigational New Drugs. Includes emergency INDs, FAQs,
etc.
-New Drug Applications
-Generic Drug Applications
-Electronic Submissions
-Small Business Assistance Program. Includes funding sources
and orphan drugs.
-Post Drug Approval Activities. Includes advertising,
medication errors, drug shortages and surveillance
activities.
Treatment activist Brenda Lein of Project Inform said,
"The information is absolutely wonderful and I'd encourage
any treatment activist who isn't clear about the FDA and
their process to read through the materials and become
familiar with the drug discovery and development process...
[including] why companies conduct certain tests based on
what the FDA requires of them, and why other tests may not
be conducted."
The FDA site is at
http://www.fda.gov/cder/regulatory/applications/default.htm
*****
African Americans and AIDS: Highlights of 2nd Annual
Washington Conference
by Al Cunningham
African Americans have access to modern HIV treatment,
but far too many have not been tested and are not receiving
medical care, according to speakers at the 2000 National
Conference on African-Americans and AIDS, February 24 and 25
in Washington, D. C.; racism, sexism, homophobia, stigma
associated with HIV and AIDS, lack of trust in the
healthcare system, and lack of access to healthcare, remain
major barriers. The two-day conference, sponsored by Johns
Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bristol-Myers
Squibb, was the second annual meeting on African Americans
and AIDS, with talks by leading researchers, public health
officials, and non-government activists.
Some highlights:
* Long-term survivor Phill Wilson, who opened the
meeting, later noted that 50% of the new AIDS cases among
men who have sex with men are now men of color. "The
tragedy is that this did not have to happen. Men of color
were disproportionately impacted in 1989 when they were 30%
of AIDS cases among men who have sex with men. The question
now is what are we going to do at this time?" Wilson is a
gay African American activist and founder of the African
American AIDS Policy and Training Institute,
http://www.AAAinstitute.org
* U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna
Shalala described the Clinton Administration strategy as
3-fold: to put needed money into communities; to prevent
the spread of HIV, and to eliminate barriers to care. "Too
few African Americans are getting tested or getting access
to care. The cost of treatment is high. The regimen of
pills is difficult to follow. And prevention messages have
not been targeted enough -- or become accepted enough -- in
the African American community."
* Human-rights leader Jesse L. Jackson Sr. called for
visible African Americans to model the importance of testing
-- followed by his own public test at a local HIV clinic for
African Americans.
* John G. Bartlett, M. D., from Johns Hopkins,
discussed the government guidelines for HIV treatment, most
recently updated January 29 (see "New Guidelines for HIV
Treatment; Resistance Testing Now Recommended," AIDS
TREATMENT NEWS #337, February 18, 2000). Dr. Bartlett also
cited some of the long-term consequences of the HAART
combinations, including elevated triglycerides and
cholesterol levels, fat accumulation and fat wasting
(lipodystrophy), insulin resistance or diabetes, and other
disorders. He suggested that it is too soon to generalize
about the benefits and risks of early HAART therapy.
* Anthony S. Fauci, M. D., Director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the
National Institutes of Health, emphasized that while the
guidelines are important, they do not mean that everyone
must be treated -- and patients' rights to choose not to be
treated should be respected. Dr. Fauci also noted that
globally, 90% to 95% of people who need antiretroviral
treatment will never get it. He referred the audience to
http://www.hivatis.org for the latest updated version of the
treatment guidelines.
* Robert C. Gallo, M. D., discussed the search for
biological treatments for HIV infection, which could be
nontoxic and inexpensive. His talk included beta
chemokines, and also the role of tat in HIV infection and
immune suppression. His group is developing a tat toxoid
which might be useful in both treatment and/or vaccination
against HIV.
Full audio and slide presentations should be available
by April at the Johns Hopkins Web site, http://www.hopkins-
aids.edu
*****
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Ruth Hubbard (a.k.a. Ruth Wald, née Hoffmann; March 3, 1924 – September 1, 2016) was a professor of biology at Harvard University, where she was the first woman to hold a tenured professorship position in biology.

To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.

– Ruth Hubbard US biologist b.1924

Considering how AIDS saturates our public discourse, galvanises our politicians, thrills our gee-whiz journalists, inspires our musicians, worries our clergy, agitates our AIDS-activist lawyers, perturbs the judges of even our highest court, engages the South African Law Commission’s energies in cooking up imaginative new bills, dominates our medical research effort, infuses exciting new relevance into tired careers in virology departments, and siphons off our tax rands into the pockets of our condom missionaries and ‘AIDS counselors’ proselytizing indefatigably to a stubborn public, your regular guy might be excused for believing that our country and the world were in the throes of a dire public health crisis, a new Black Death, and for thinking that the fact of it was as certain as any in science about which there obtains a universal consensus.

In fact, hundreds of scientists of the highest rank disagree with the HIV-AIDS causation hypothesis. They think ‘AIDS’ as a medical construct is a passing fad, a fashionable new name for age-old ills, and that boiled down, AIDS is just money spinning political kitsch. In their most assiduous dissents they emphasize that ‘HIV’ has never been isolated under the well-settled rules for viral isolation, assert that ‘HIV’ has never been shown to exist as an infectious entity of exogenous origin, and demonstrate that every protein claimed uniquely to be constituent of ‘HIV’ is actually cellular, not viral – in other words, that all HIV-positive test results are false positives. In short, they consider the HIV-AIDS paradigm a scientific blunder of biblical proportions, and its experts foolish quacks. These AIDS dissidents include professors emeriti at the pinnacle of their specialities in cell-biology, virology and related fields. They also include leading mathematicians, actuaries, and law and history professors. Among them are two exceptionally distinguished Nobel laureates in our time, Walter Gilbert (Chemistry 1980), and the Einstein of modern biology, Kary Mullis (Chemistry 1993).

Dr Peter Duesberg, professor of cell-biology, University of California at Berkeley, member of The National Academy of Sciences: Before Duesberg’s wrecking-ball challenge to Gallo’s HIV-AIDS theory was published as an invited paper in the prestigious journal Cancer Research in 1988, Gallo had observed, “No one knows more about retroviruses than Peter Duesberg.” Once acclaimed as a widely published and extensively cited Nobel candidate, but now ‘delegitimated’ as a scientist, Duesberg was the recipient of the largest annual research grant in biology for years – awarded for the pursuit of whatever avenue of scientific enquiry took his fancy. Stripped of his grant and his post-graduate classes, practically barred from researching and publishing, and reduced to chairmanship of his faculty’s annual picnic committee, he continues to point out the fundamental anomalies, deficiencies and paradoxes of the 15 year old theory that the 29 old diseases renamed AIDS in the presence of HIV antibodies could have any causal link to a retrovirus. However, Duesberg finds himself increasingly alone in the AIDS dissident camp too, eclipsed by Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al (below) whose more fundamental tack in impeaching the HIV-AIDS theory is winning over its best heterodox scientists, most recently, Kary Mullis (below), pathology and epidemiology specialist Gordon Stewart (below), and Etienne de Haarven, pathology professor emeritus at Toronto, renowned for his published work in the electron photomicrography of viruses.

Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, bio-physicist, department of medical physics, Royal Perth Hospital, Australia: Collaborating with, among others, John Papadimitriou, a practicing pathologist and professor at University of Western Australia’s medical school, David Causer, senior physicist, head of the department of medical physics and professor at Royal Perth Hospital, and Valendar Turner, consultant emergency physician at the Royal Perth Hospital, Papadopulos-Eleopulos has raised the most radical and dramatic challenges to the HIV-AIDS theory, by highlighting the lack of a proper gold standard for the HIV antibody tests, in that unlike other known viruses, HIV has never been isolated according to the classical procedure for the isolation of viruses, often referred to as the Pasteur Rules.

Dr Walter Gilbert, formerly molecular-biology professor at Harvard: One of contemporary science’s most outstanding and accomplished scientists, Gilbert won his Nobel for inventing the now foundational modern technique for DNA sequencing. He considers Duesberg to be “absolutely correct in saying that no one has proven that AIDS is caused by the AIDS virus. There is no animal model for AIDS, and without an animal model, you cannot establish Koch’s postulates (to prove the role of the suspected pathogen).” He observes, “The community as a whole doesn’t listen patiently to critics who adopt alternative viewpoints. Although the great lesson of history is that knowledge develops through the conflict of viewpoints.”

Dr Kary Mullis, molecular biologist: Nobel winner Mullis’ watershed invention of the Polymerase Chain Reaction technology for amplifying minute DNA fragments for identification has so revolutionised biology that one might fairly speak of two epochs, the dark ages before and the enlightenment after it. He deplores the misapplication of his invention to measure “HIV viral load.” He predicts that, “Years from now, people will find our acceptance of the HIV theory of AIDS as silly as we find those who excommunicated Galileo.” Endorsing Duesberg’s rejection of the orthodox model of infectious AIDS, he says, “As applied, the HIV theory is unfalsifiable, and useless as a medical hypothesis I can’t find a single virologist who will give me references which show HIV is the probable cause of AIDS. If you ask…you don’t get an answer, you get fury.” The HIV-AIDS hypothesis, he thinks, is “one hell of a mistake.”

Dr Harry Rubin, retrovirologist, professor of molecular biology, University of California at Berkeley, member of National Academy of Sciences: “I don’t think the cause of AIDS has been found. I think (that in) a disease as complex as AIDS there are likely to be multiple causes. In fact, to call it a single disease when there are so many multiple manifestations seems to me to be an oversimplification.”

Dr Richard Strohman, emeritus professor of cell-biology, University of California at Berkeley: The HIV-AIDS hypothesis is “bankrupt.”

Dr Beverly Griffin, director and professor of virology, Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London: “I do not believe HIV, in and of itself, can cause AIDS.”

Dr Gordon Stewart, emeritus professor of epidemiology, University of Glasgow, and former AIDS advisor to the World Health Organisation: “AIDS is a behavioural disease. It is multifactorial, brought on by several simultaneous strains on the immune system – drugs, pharmaceutical and recreational, sexually transmitted diseases, multiple viral infections… there is no specific etiologic agent of AIDS… the disease arises as a result of a cumulative process following a period of exposure to multiple environmental factors… Nobody wants to look at the facts about this disease. It’s the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve sent countless letters to medical journals pointing out the epidemiological discrepancies and they simply ignore them. The fact is, this whole heterosexual AIDS thing is a hoax.”

Dr Albert Sabin, discoverer of live-virus polio vaccine, National Institutes of Health: “The basis of present action and education is that everybody who tests positive for the virus must be regarded as a transmitter and there is no evidence for that.”

Dr Bernard Forscher, former managing editor of the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “The HIV hypothesis ranks with the ‘bad air’ theory for malaria and the ‘bacterial infection’ theory of beriberi and pellagra (caused by nutritional deficiencies). It is a hoax that became a scam.”

Dr Alfred Hassig, immunologist, former emeritus professor of immunology, University of Bern, and former director of a Swiss blood transfusion laboratory: “The sentences of death accompanying the medical diagnosis of AIDS should be abolished.”

Dr Charles Thomas, former professor of molecular biology at Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities: “It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV causes the group of diseases called AIDS. Many biomedical scientists now question this hypothesis. We propose that a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis be conducted by a suitable independent group.” He himself has no doubts. He rejects the HIV-AIDS hypothesis as a “fraud”.
Dr Phillip Johnson, senior professor of law, University of California at Berkeley: “The establishment continues to doctor statistics and misrepresent the situation to keep the public convinced that a major viral pandemic is under way when the facts are otherwise.”

Dr Serge Lang, professor of mathematics, Yale University and member of the National Academy of Sciences: “There does not even exist a single proper definition of AIDS on which discourse or statistics can reliably be based… the CDC calls these diseases AIDS only when antibodies against HIV are confirmed or presumed to be present. If a person tests HIV negative, then the diseases are given another name I do not regard the causal relationship between HIV and any disease as settled. I have seen considerable evidence that highly improper statistics concerning HIV and AIDS have been passed off as science, and that top members of the scientific establishment have carelessly, if not irresponsibly, joined the media in spreading misinformation about the nature of AIDS.”

Dr Joseph Sonnabend, South African born New York physician: “The marketing of HIV, through press releases and statements, as a killer virus causing AIDS without the need for any other factors, has so distorted research and treatment that it may have caused thousands of people to suffer and die.”

Dr Harvey Bialy, editor of the science journal Nature Bio/Technology: “From both my literature review and my personal experience over most of the AIDS – so called AIDS centres in Africa, I can find absolutely no believable persuasive evidence that Africa is in the midst of a new epidemic of infectious immunodeficiency.”

Dr Charles L. Geshekter, professor of African History, California State University: … From “Cameroon to California, sex education must no longer be distorted by terrifying, dubious misinformation that equates sex with death… African poverty, not some extraordinary sexual behavior, is the best predictor of AIDS-defining diseases… A 1994 report in the Journal of Infectious Diseases concluded that HIV tests were useless in central Africa, where the microbes responsible for tuberculosis, malaria, and leprosy were so prevalent that they registered over 70% false positive results…in people whose immune systems are compromised for a wide variety of reasons other than HIV…”

Dr Hiram Caton, ethicist, head of the School of Applied Ethics at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia: “The AIDS epidemic was a mirage manufactured by scientists who believed that integrity could be maintained amidst the diverting influences of big money, prestige and politics.”

Dr Ralph Moss: author of The Cancer Industry: “The paradigm that was laid down for how to milk the cancer problem is basically the same paradigm which is being followed in milking the AIDS problem.”

Questions of safety and utility.

Adv Anthony Brink of the Pietermaritzburg Bar discusses AZT with Dr Desmond Martin, Deputy Director of the National Institute for Virology in Johannesburg and Director of its AIDS Unit, and President of The Southern African HIV-AIDS Clinicians Society. Dr Martin serves as virology consultant on the editorial board of the AIDS journal AIDS Bulletin, published by the South African Medical Research Council, and is Co-Chair of the Scientific Programme (Basic Sciences) for the XIIIth International AIDS Conference to be held in Durban in July 2000.

Foreword

On 17 March 1999, my critical essay AZT: A Medicine from Hell was published in The Citizen, a daily newspaper distributed nationally in South Africa. Its sardonic tone and polemical style were contrived to stimulate a public debate of hitherto unexamined issues in the current controversy in South Africa concerning the provision of AZT to rape victims and HIV-positive pregnant women, for which AIDS activists, journalists, opposition politicians, doctors and health workers have been agitating strenuously.

South Africa’s leading AIDS authority, Dr Desmond Martin rose to the piece and mounted a rebuttal on 31 March entitled AZT: A Medicine from Heaven.

My rejoinder AZT and Heavenly Remedies was printed the following day. It has since been substantially revised, extended and updated, and includes mention of several papers appearing in the journalsClinical Infectious Diseases, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Medicine, AIDS, the Journal of Medical Virology,The Lancet, Mutation Research, the Journal of the American Medical Association and Current Medical Research and Opinion between April and September 1999.

Dr Martin’s off-topic contentions are addressed in an appendix to my reply, available on request.

At my instance, NOSEWEEK – edited and published by South Africa’s most accomplished and respected investigative journalist, Martin Welz – will be covering AZT in a forthcoming edition, according to notices appearing in both its November 1998 and May 1999 issues.

The more ignorant, reckless and thoughtless a doctor is, the higher his reputation soars, even amongst powerful princes.

Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466-1536), Dutch humanist.

Praise of Folly, ch. 33 (1509).

National Health Minister Nkosazana Zuma has been condemned by just about everyone recently for her heartless decision not to make a drug called AZT available at state expense to HIV-positive pregnant women. It reduces the risk, so its said, of the transmission of HIV from mother to child. Politicians and journalists from left to right have joined moist-eyed, hand-wringing doctors pleading for the free provision of AZT to these women, their babies cruelly deprived and doomed to die, they say.

In all the fuss about the ministers decision on AZT, no-one seems to have stopped to ask, “So what the hell is this stuff anyway?”

In 1964, a chemist, Jerome Horwitz, synthesized a sophisticated cell poison for the treatment for leukaemia*. He called it Compound S. Its formal title is 3-Azido-3-deoxythymidine, or Azidothymidine for short, but everyone knows it by its nickname, AZT.

It works like this. Thymidine is one of the four nucleotides (building blocks) of DNA, the basic molecule of life. AZT is an artificial fake, a dead ringer for thymidine. As a cell synthesizes new DNA while preparing to divide in order to spawn another, AZT either steals in to take the place of the real thing, or else disrupts the delicate process by interfering with the cells regulation of the relative concentrations of nucleotide pools present during DNA synthesis. Thats the end of the cell line. Cell division and replication, wrecked by the presence of the plastic imposter, comes to a halt. Chemotherapeutic drugs such as AZT are described as DNA chain terminators accordingly. Their effect is wholesale cell death of every type, particularly the rapidly dividing cells of the immune system and those lining our guts. Horwitz found that the sick immune cells went, but with so many others that his poison was plainly useless as a medicine. It was akin to napalm-bombing a school to kill some roof-rats. AZT was abandoned. It wasnt even patented. For two decades it collected dust forgotten – until the advent of the AIDS era.

As soon as Dr Robert Gallo made his famous press-conference announcement on 23 April 1984 that his virus was the probable cause of AIDS, the race was on to find a pharmaceutical weapon against it. The stratospheric profit potential (since borne out) of the first to the post was on everybodys mind. Obviously, if an already synthesized drug could be applied to the malady, it would short-cut most of the road-race there. AZT was fished off the shelf, along with numerous other abandoned brews, and put to some in vitro tests. It demonstrated a bright alchemical sparkle. On the basis of a reassuring but fallacious assertion that AZT was specifically antagonistic to HIV, and a thousand times more toxic to the latter than human cells generally, the drug went to clinical trials. The chaos that the trials degenerated into is a tale too long to tell here. It wouldnt be extravagant to call them fraudulent. At best, they were so incompetently staged that the data gathered under them were useless, save to note that many of its subjects taking AZT needed repeated blood transfusions to keep going. Small surprise, since AZT was designed specifically to kill blood cells; the label (bearing skull and cross-bones) on laboratory supplies cautions, “Toxic by inhalation, in contact with skin and if swallowed. Target organ(s): Blood, bone marrow Wear suitable protective clothing.”

Four months after the trial started, it was prematurely called off, on an interpretation of the provisional results deemed positive for the drug by the trial overseer. Next, it went before the FDA, to be approved in record time under huge pressure from gay lobbyists. Strong reservations were expressed at the hearing about its dreadful toxicity. The chairmans vote against was defeated. As the most poisonous drug ever licensed by the FDA for indefinite use, and with the conviction apparently that the terrible new disease needed a terrible medicine, AZT was approved for use in extreme AIDS cases only – for which you might want to read, in cases of people very ill with their presenting AIDS indicator disease, fungal pneumonia or what have you. It wasnt a year later, in the orgy of stupidity that characterises the AIDS age, that AZT was officially recommended for administration to entirely healthy people unfortunate to ring positive to an HIV antibody test. Since the drug destroys the very immune cells allegedly attacked by HIV, the introduction of AZT as a treatment regimen for asymptomatic HIV positive people saw the AIDS mortality rate among the previously well take off like a rocket. Five years and countless deaths later, and only after the disastrous results of the Concorde trials in Europe and St Mary trials in the US had come in, was this murderous treatment recommendation reversed. AZT, it was found, did no good. Of course not. On any intelligent consideration of its pharmacological action, AZT could never in a million years be anti-viral, any more than arsenic could have cured the scurvy for which it was administered to sailors, and later, to troops in the trenches in the First World War.

In Europe and the US, HIV-positive long term survivors quietly gather to form groups, having sloughed off the terror of the death sentences passed on them by their doctors. Heres the strangest thing. Without exception, what they find they all have in common is that they all eschewed (or quickly gave up) AZT, related nucleoside analogues like 3TC, and protease inhibitors. Some have pondered the unthinkable: that nearly all medically managed AIDS cases, always terminal, represent that balefully familiar phenomenon in the history of medicine, iatrogenicide – to be killed by the cure. Their reasoning looks less obscure when one reads the AZT package insert. To do so might tempt one to wonder impertinently whether AZT wasnt AIDS by prescription. Indeed, such perverse conjecture is actually confirmed in capitals: AZT use “MAY BE ASSOCIATED WITH HEMATOLOGIC TOXICITY INCLUDING GRANULOCYTOPENIA AND SEVERE ANEMIA” (destruction of white and red blood cells respectively), and “PROLONGED USE OF RETROVIR HAS BEEN ASSOCIATED WITH SYMPTOMATIC MYOPATHY (gross atrophy of muscle tissue) SIMILAR TO THAT PRODUCED BY HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS”. As to the latter alibi, history will judge whether the thousands of healthy HIV-positive people who embarked on their metabolic poison treatment and wasted away (as the AZT insert predicted) would have died had they ignored doctors orders and thrown their pills away. Here the syphilis story is instructive.

Before the introduction of mercury and arsenic salts as a treatment for this clap, the organic brain damage and dementia that signaled tertiary- or neuro-syphilis was quite unknown to medicine, and then disappeared when penicillin replaced the older decoctions. The moral is hard to miss.

One sane notion in that otherwise mad dance with death that chemotherapy for cancer involves is that you stop before you drop. Since healthy cells are always killed in the crossfire, the idea is to rescue the patient from going over the cliff along with the target bad cells, by taking him off the drug in the nick of time. That iron rule is broken in AIDS treatment. Youre going to die, youre told, so better take the bitter medicine to the bitter end, to stave off the evil day. But as AZT heads like a heat-seeking missile for ones immune and energy transporting cells (“target organs: blood, bone marrow”, remember?) dying of AIDS on AZT is a racing certainty. No one has ever been cured by AZT, but it sells like hot cakes all the same, still the most widely prescribed AIDS drug, and it reaps profits counted in billions of pounds.

Ever irrepressible as a medicine following one failure after another, in 1994 AZT was proposed as a treatment for pregnant women to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child, or so it was touted. Until then, it had been staunchly contraindicated during pregnancy. Generously underwritten by the drugs manufacturer, the study, ACTG 076, in which this startlingly novel use of AZT was tried, epitomises the junk-science that characterises so much AIDS research. Of 477 babies born to HIV-positive mothers in the trial, 13 in the AZT-treated group were born antibody-positive, against 40 in the placebo group. Apart from the lunacy of basing a decision on such feeble numbers to dose HIV-positive mothers with a cell-toxin as lethal as AZT, the underlying assumption that an HIV-positive test result predicts inevitable illness and death is a canard of modern medicine which, surprisingly, wants for evidence. Most babies seroconvert to HIV-negative in any event, medicated or not. The other overarching myth is that the mere presence of antibodies in ones bloodstream signifies an active infection. Isnt it elementary that we carry antibodies to all sorts of pathogens that we have met and defeated? Isnt this first-year stuff? AZT advocates confess to being completely in the dark to account for the vaunted HIV blocking effect they claim. The reason why vitamin A administered instead works precisely the same magic might be a pointer to something less interesting: stressed health, thanks to chronic poor nourishment and living conditions. As for the positive immune signals a short course of AZT can generate, poison ingestion provokes an immune reaction as the body rises to the insult. This is old hat.

Thrown to the wind have been all the safeguards set up to ensure that the Diethylstilbestrol and Thalidomide tragedies would never happen again. Before the hysteria of the AIDS age, women were enjoined even to avoid drinking beer whilst pregnant. A recently reconfirmed active carcinogen, and teratogen too – cells not killed outright are nastily maimed – AZT freely crosses the placental barrier, so the package insert tells us cheerfully. Has anyone here paused to question whether a growing foetus comprising rapidly dividing cells should be exposed to a random terminator of DNA chain synthesis? Apparently not. Certainly not the recipients of Glaxo-Wellcomes largesse from its slush fund of millions for those who make AIDS their business in this country. Nor our doctors carrying out bold medical experiments on the foetuses of pregnant black women – whose unlucky dice gives them a positive registration to the irredeemably and hopelessly non-specific HIV antibody test. Of course anyone in the game crying foul, and drawing attention to the reams of literature in the medical journals about the harm AZT causes – especially to the young, is going to find himself sent off and defunded, for keeps. (Were it not for the amazing collapse of critical intelligence in the AIDS age, Glaxo-Wellcomes heart-warming contributions to the fight against AIDS, with its research grants and cut-prices – described by the Mail and Guardian as a “bouquet of assistance” – might have been seen less as philanthropy than commerce, pure and simple. As it has achieved so successfully abroad, what better way to fix its local market than by buying off our medical establishment and AIDS activist crowd with lolly aplenty to fund their risible projects? And by baiting our government with current discounts for its rancid wares, in order to hook longer-term contractual commitments.)

The AIDS Law Project at Wits currently busies itself with plans to sue the minister in the High Court for an order compelling her to respect pregnant womens rights to AZT, and dole it out on the house. Then again, its AIDS activist lawyers gratefully take junkets to AIDS conferences in holiday cities overseas at Glaxo-Wellcomes expense. The human rights they pursue might be better served were these legal crusaders to call off their foolish case and think of ways best to bite the hand that feeds them: several actions for loss of support have been launched against Glaxo-Wellcome in England and the USA, arising out of the deaths of family members killed by their doctors prescriptions of AZT.

Although she has explained her perplexing decision on AZT on the basis of financial considerations exclusively, saying she would rather spend her money on AIDS education, one day Health Minister Nkosazana Zuma will be praised for her great prescient wisdom in keeping AZT away from pregnant women and their foetuses. A bit like much-lauded Dr Francis Kelsey, whom Kennedy honoured for her wise perspicacity in sparing the USA the European Thalidomide calamity, when in truth her only notable trait was her fortuitously inefficient foot-dragging in obstructing the start of the FDA approval process.

Its high time that all involved in this nightmarish mess go off and do some basic homework in the subject in which they have so much to say for themselves.

To a colleague, his widow and his son.

*Horwitz, J.P., Chua, J. and Noel, M: Nucleosides. V. The monomesylates of 1-(2-Deoxy-beta-D-lyxofuranosyl)thymine, Journal of Organic Chemistry 29: 2076-2078 (1964). An American biochemistry professor with whom I have corresponded privately and who prefers both to remain anonymous and not to upset the settled history – based on the first to publish – makes a documented prior claim to the first synthesis of AZT in the autumn of 1961.

AZT: A Medicine from Heaven

THE Southern African HIV/AIDS Clinicians’ Society responds to an article AZT: A Medicine from Hell, by Anthony Brink, published in The Citizen on March 17.

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) disease is a major global health problem and is associated with a significant morbidity and mortality.

The number of people infected with HIV is rapidly increasing; recent estimates indicate more than 30 million adults and 1,1 million children are infected worldwide. In South Africa it is estimated that in excess of three million people are infected. It has been predicted that 40 million persons, including four to five million children, will have acquired the infection by the year 2000. Mother-to-child transmission, the major cause of HIV infection in infants, has led to a 30 percent increase in the mortality rate of infants and children in recent years.

The introduction of highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) has been good news. In the US the age-adjusted death rate among people with HIV in 1997 was less than 40 percent of what it was in 1995. This experienced was mirrored in other Western nations where dramatic declines in morbidity and mortality as a result of the increasing use of combination anti-retroviral therapy has occurred; many of these regimens contain AZT.

When AZT and other nucleoside analogues were first introduced they were used as monotherapy (a single drug was used). Clinical experience quickly showed that the effect of a single drug was short-lived, as resistance to the drug developed. It was then shown that by using a combination of drugs, a more lasting effect was obtained.

BENEFICIAL

An added advantage of combination therapy was that the drugs acted at different stages of the replication cycle of the virus. This option therefore made sense; the risk of drug resistance was drastically reduced and long-lasting beneficial effects have been recorded. AZT together with 3TC and a protease inhibitor is a combination that has been found to be highly effective.

Impaired quality of life associated with the progression of HIV disease has a profound effect on the patient and leads to an increase in the direct medical and non-medical costs of illness. Published studies have shown that patients on combination therapy with AZT and 3TC have been able to maintain or more importantly improve their quality of life.

So effective are combination anti-retroviral regimens in reducing the complications of the disease that there are anecdotal reports emanating from the US that Aids wards are being emptied of their patients and in some instances wards have been closed. Clinicians are now treating patients in out-patient settings and the status of the disease has changed to that of a chronic manageable disease.

It is however, in the arena of prevention of HIV infection that AZT has produced dramatic results.

Worldwide, approximately 500 000 infants become infected each year as a result of mother-to-child transmission. In some African countries 25 percent of pregnant women are infected with HIV. Without preventative therapy up to a third of their babies may become infected; many of these children will die in their early years.

In 1994 a clinical trial conducted in the US and France (ACTG 076) demonstrated that AZT given to mothers during their pregnancies, intravenously during labour and orally to their babies for six weeks reduced the risk of mother-to-child transmission by 67 percent. This regimen has been adopted as the “standard of care” in the US.

However, it is unsuitable for developing countries because of its complexity and cost.

To address the problem the Ministry of Health in Thailand introduced a trial of simpler and less expensive regimens of AZT to prevent mother-to-child transmission. This trial showed that a simpler regimen of AZT given orally to mothers in the last weeks of pregnancy reduced the risk of transmission by 50 percent. This short course AZT regimen (so-called Thailand regimen) is much more suitable for developing countries than the US-protocol because it is much easier to administer and less costly ($50 v $800).

Preliminary data from United Nation Aids Programme (UNAids)- sponsored studies have also demonstrated that even more abbreviated, affordable, AZT-containing regimens may be equally effective.

Another instance where preventative AZT therapy is commonly used is in the event of a health-care worker (HCW) sustaining an occupational exposure to blood or body fluids from an HIV infected person (eg. needle-stick injury).

These occurrences are usually charged with much emotion and HCW’s are, quite justifiably, entitled to appropriate post-exposure prophylaxis to be commenced as soon as possible after the injury. A multinational study conducted among occupationally exposed HCW’s demonstrated a 79 percent reduction in the risk of acquiring HIV infection when AZT was used as post-exposure prophylaxis.

TOXICITY

The toxicity of AZT is a very real issue however, the toxicity (particularly bone marrow toxicity) is usually noted in patients with advanced HIV disease whose bone marrow function may already be impaired by HIV disease. Toxicity does not appear to be a problem during short-term use (post exposure prophylaxis or mother-to-child transmission prevention).

Nevertheless vigilance and monitoring on the part of the clinician is necessary. If toxicity occurs the drug should be stopped and other drugs substituted and any appropriate management should occur. Toxicity in most cases is reversible. In addition, careful monitoring of babies whose mothers took AZT during pregnancy has failed to show any significant abnormal findings.

Thus AZT in combination with other drugs has proved to be invaluable for the treatment of those already infected with HIV and has also proved to be a potent preventative agent in the mother-to-child setting and for occupational exposures. For these very reasons the drug AZT deserves the accolade : AZT: a medicine from heaven.

Desmond J Martin is President of the South African HIV/Aids Clinicians Society.

Note: Dr Martin has no conflict of interest and has not received financial sponsorship from Glaxo-Wellcome.

AZT and Heavenly Remedies

Anthony Brink

What can you do against the lunatic…who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

In his letter covering his response to my essay AZT: A Medicine from Hell, Martin rebukes the editor of The Citizen for his “gross irresponsibility” in publishing my piece without first having obtained the views of “the established experts.” In this reply, we’ll have a look at what experts from the top drawer of the AIDS research establishment have to say about AZT, the kind of guys who get to publish in the world’s most splendid medical and scientific journals.

True believer that he is, Martin sonorously praises “Highly Active Anti-retroviral Therapy” (HAART – cocktails of AZT and other metabolic poisons) as “good news” and “highly effective”, and even reports mass Lazarus cures with entire hospital wards closing down. Really? Not according to big-time AIDS clinician Dr Michael Saag of the University of Alabama, coeditor of ‘cutting-edge’ tomeAIDS Therapy just published in January. No dissident, he’s a paid consultant for AZT manufacturer Glaxo-Wellcome and other pharmaceutical corporations. In an interview in Esquire in April, he confesses that the HAART “‘dam’ is already leaking; there’s high danger of it collapsing altogether. Failures are occurring right and left.” He states plainly that doctors “should expect failure with whatever (HAART cocktail they) first use. We should plan on it. We should prepare for it. Clinicians should expect failure.” And failure they get.

Carr and Cooper wrote in The Lancet in December last year: “As the evanescent blush of success with so-called highly active antiretroviral therapy regimens begins to recede into the darkness…post-1996 AIDS conference hype (about) combination therapy including a protease inhibitor…(has come) back to haunt us.”

In April in the journal AIDS, Dr Steven Deeks and his colleagues at San Francisco General Hospital and the University of California, reported treatment failure for more than half their AIDS patients given HAART ‘triple-therapy’. Similarly, Medical Professor Dr Julio Montaner, head of AIDS Research at St Paul’s Hospital/University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and co-director of the Canadian HIV Trials Network tells us in the May issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association that, “Given the complexities and the increasingly recognized potential for long-term adverse effects of many of the currently available treatments, it is hardly surprising that (for) an alarmingly high proportion of patients…the failure (rate) has been in the order of 30% to 50% of patients at 1 year…”

Several other research papers published about AZT-based HAART in May and June all point a thumbs-down:

In May, in the New England Journal of Medicine, Zhang et al at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York report that following combination antiretroviral therapy “replication-competent virus can still be recovered from latently infected resting memory CD4 lymphocytes; this finding raises serious doubts about whether antiviral treatment can eradicate HIV-1… Six of the eight patients had no significant variations in proviral sequences during treatment…(and) it may require many years of effective antiretroviral treatment to eliminate HIV-1.” The researchers fret: “We are unable…to explain why drug-sensitive HIV-1 is capable of replicating at low levels during treatment with three or four drugs. But it is essential to the therapeutic effort that the answer, be it pharmacokinetic or cellular in nature, be obtained promptly.” Furtado and colleagues of the Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, reporting their research findings in the same issue, don’t beat about the bush so much: “HIV-1 infection cannot be eradicated with current treatments.” And Harrigan et al at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia report in AIDS in May that in six patients with undetectable viral loads who gave up HAART “because of lipodystrophy, narcotic overdose, insomnia, and/or high blood pressure,” all experienced “HIV rebound…within 6 to 15 days…and approached or exceeded pretherapy (plasma HIV RNA) levels…within 21 days of stopping therapy.”

Commenting on these dismal findings, AIDS boss Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases in the US concedes with his characteristic up-beat gloss on yet another broken therapeutic promise, “What all these studies underscore is the pressing need to develop more effective, less toxic medications that can be used over the long term to suppress HIV, as well as novel strategies to then purge residual virus from the body and boost the immune system.” In plain English, this translates to an urgent need to find alternatives to AZT-cocktails because they are too poisonous and too ineffective to justify continued use.

In Nature Medicine in May, two other papers document how useless and harmful AZT-based ‘triple-therapy’ is. The first by Finzi et al at Johns Hopkins University Medical School tells the “depressing news” that “resting T-cells” said to be infected by HIV are impervious to HAART and appear to need a lifetime’s uninterrupted treatment – a regimen which the researchers point out is not feasible due to its toxicity. The second paper by Picker et al of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center suggests that patients on HAART need to take “vacations” from such medicine periodically, in view of their finding that HAART itself causes a reduction in their patients’ T-cell counts, and that patients suffer a significantly weakened immune capacity after such treatment. And in the May issue of AIDS, Ibanez et al at the Fundació irsiCaixa, Retrovirology Laboratory, Hospital Universitari Germans Trias i Pujol, in Barcelona, Spainreport their findings “that 48 weeks of HAART does not significantly reduce the integrated HIV-1 proviral DNA load in the latently infected CD4 T cell reservoir.” In July, an article in The Lancet mentions a disappointing study just reported in Annals of Internal Medicine by Lucas et al at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Of 273 patients given HAART over a two year period, only “23% of the cohort had fewer than 500 copies/mL HIV1 RNA in all three time intervals” during the trial.

Commenting ruefully on the Finzi and Zhang studies in the June issue of Nature Medicine, Saag and his colleague Michael Kilby at the AIDS Clinical Trials Unit, University of Alabama rub in the rude fact that HAART doesn’t work: “As (Zhang et al have) suggested, immediate attention should focus on the reasons why three- and four-drug potent anti-retroviral therapy does not completely suppress virus replication…even in the presence of undetectable HIV plasma RNA levels.”

In July The Lancet mentions a disappointing study just reported in Annals of Internal Medicine by Lucas et al at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Of 273 patients given HAART over a two year period, only “23% of the cohort had fewer than 500 copies/mL HIV1 RNA in all three time intervals” during the trial.

AZT-based HAART has been said to prevent new rounds of infection by stopping HIV DNA from producing HIV RNA and thence the proteins and particles which AIDS experts identify as HIV. Since these latest research findings reveal that during HAART, the HIV viral burden – the amount of DNA provirus – does not alter, the “established experts” are confronted with small choice in rotten apples: either HAART isn’t anti-retroviral, or there is no relationship between HIV DNA and HIV RNA (which runs counter to a fundamental notion in the HIV theory of AIDS), or all that these cyto-toxic drugs do is hinder cells making RNA of any kind, or perhaps they just interfere in the measurement of whatever RNAs there are. Or all of the above. Take your lucky pick.

Current HAART research reports are reminiscent of the Pellagra plague in the US South over the first four decades of this century, for which Fowler’s Solution (arsenic) was the drug of choice. Heaps of impressive research articles were published in the medical journals regarding treatments for the germs causing this terrible disease, which affected millions and caused people to die in droves. It turned out the experts were all barking up the wrong tree. Everyone now knows that Pellagra is a disease of nutritional deficiency, and has nothing to do with germs. Pity about the quarantined patients in dozens of specially built pellagrin-hospitals who died of arsenic poisoning before the experts eventually changed their minds.

Writing in AIDS in 1997, Kelleher et al noted, “Lack of strong evidence exists for sustained immune reconstitution by current therapies (comprising AZT and other drugs, and AZT may) unmask silent opportunistic infections.” Like PCP. Pneumocystitis carinii pneumonia is a scarce disease, very difficult to diagnose accurately. It is caused by a ubiquitous fungal germ in just about all of our lungs. As a rule it only takes over, often together with esophageal candidiasis (a related fungal infestation), when harmful chemicals create the opportunity. Tracts of tissue in these moist regions, poisoned by heavy antibiotic use, poppers (amyl nitrite) inhalation, cancer chemotherapy, or AZT (about which more below), become the seedbeds for these fungi to thrive, like green mould on damp bread. Doubters might wonder why in South Africa, only the rich who can afford AZT – alone, or as the basis of triple-therapy cocktails – develop PCP. Not penurious blacks, the overwhelming majority of HIV-positives here, both proportionately and in gross numerical terms. Their ‘AIDS indicator diseases’, if they ever develop, are the dull sicknesses that the poor in Africa have always endured. Nothing exotic like PCP.

Not only can AZT “unmask silent opportunistic infections”, it can exacerbate clinically conspicuous ones. Havlir and Barnes reported in February in the New England Journal of Medicine that HIV-positive Tuberculosis patients treated with (AZT-based) ‘antiretroviral therapy’ developed “paradoxical worsening of disease…in up to 36 percent of (them), characterized by fever, worsening chest infiltrates on radiograph, and peripheral and mediastinal lymphadenopathy…(whereas) only 7 percent of patients who received antituberculosis therapy but not antiretroviral therapy had paradoxical reactions.”

In the Esquire article, Saag complains that the death rate of his patients on combinations of AZT, its chemical cousins like 3TC and ddI, and protease inhibitors is on the rise: “They aren’t dying of a traditionally defined AIDS illness,” he says. “I don’t know what they’re dying of, but they are dying. They’re just wasting and dying.” Could it be that cell-poisons poison cells? But such myopia is par for AIDS doctors who learn their trade by rote. And from drug advertisements. Of course the thought that Saag is killing his patients with his sponsors’ drugs is probably too awful to entertain. “It is sobering;” Saag continues, “while we are making good guesses, they are just guesses. We don’t know what we are doing.” It’s hard to disagree. How good the treatment guesses are was revealed during an interview by Ted Koppel on Nightline on 19 May. Saag admitted that “unfortunately, right now, the roller coaster is headed back downhill. And it’s not really clear how far down it’s going to go, but the momentum right now is certainly in the wrong direction.”

US AIDS treatment specialist Dr Joseph Jemsek is more forthright. On 8 January, he was interviewed on the ABC television news show 20/20:

Q: And…in addition, the drugs themselves could kill her by damaging her heart, liver, her pancreas.

JJ: The drugs aren’t perfect. They cause side effects, which are cumulative and inexorable. Now I’m starting to see people die again.

Q: So people are actually dying of the side effects of these…

JJ: Yes, you’re…

Q: …anti-viral drugs?

JJ: Yes, you’re starting to see that.

Martin’s happy claim that AZT cocktails afford “long-lasting beneficial effects” was refuted in November 1997, when Lemp et al reported in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and Human Retrovirology that with HAART, “the treatment benefit is temporary and confers no long-term survival advantages.” Obviously. How could it possibly? Would you nurse your wilting pot-plant with weed-killer? In the clever age, whatever happened to common sense? At last some lay folk are waking up; Steven Gendin wrote an article in the January issue of AIDS-drugs-promoting rag POZ, candidly entitled, “If the virus doesn’t get you, the drugs you take will.” He’s seen enough of his friends fade away on AZT to know.

That AZT, the mainstay of HAART, is entirely ineffective as a therapy was borne out clearly by the large-scale Concorde trials in Europe, reported in The Lancet in April 1994. Embarrassingly for Glaxo-Wellcome, and disastrously for its share prices, the fabulous results of the chaotic American study that had preceded FDA approval of AZT couldn’t be reproduced. Glaxo-Wellcome’s representatives on the trial’s coordinating committee refused to sign the report. Understandably – they could hardly endorse a finding that their flagship money-spinner didn’t live up to its billing. (Its demonstrated therapeutic irrelevance led to AZT’s employment as a drug combined with others – all equally ineffective on their own, as if to mix three toxic duds would be to conjure them miraculously into a medicinal marvel.) In fact not only was AZT found to be useless at the end of the Concorde trials, it was found to be positively harmful: Phillips et al reported in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine in March 1997 that, “Extended follow-up of patients in one (AZT) trial, the Concorde study, has shown a significantly increased risk of death among the patients treated early.” (Another important finding by the trial’s overseers was that CD4 cell counting was a waste of time, and bore no relation to clinical health. Emphasizing the worthlessness of the practice in Annals of Internal Medicine in 1996, Fleming and DeMets described it as being “as uninformative (an indication of immune status) as a toss of a coin.” Not that anyone took any notice. Today, patients terrified by their doctors’ mournful announcements of their low cell counts – still taken as a signal of collapsing health and imminent demise – are inspired to start with ‘antiretrovirals’, following which the prophesy will be faithfully fulfilled.)

Martin’s silly statement that AZT and 3TC “improves quality of life” is just stale advertising propaganda quoted mindlessly from some glossy ad. The trouble that doctors have with patient ‘non-compliance’ is notorious, due to the intolerable, excruciating ‘side-effects’ of these drugs. Numerous papers have detailed these problems, most recently for example, Nicholson: Managing side-effects: practical advice on dealing with side-effects of antiretroviral therapies in AIDS Treatment Update, October 1998. In 1994, Lenderking et al of the Harvard School of Public Health, reporting their Evaluation of the Quality of Life Associated With Zidovudine Treatment in Asymptomatic Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection in the New England Journal of Medicine, found “a reduction in the quality of life due to severe side effects of therapy” and the “severe adverse events” it caused, which were “life-threatening in some cases.” Martin’s claim to “quality of life” on AZT sounds reminiscent of the promise of Arbeit Macht Frei.

In truth, AZT makes you feel like you’re dying. That’s because on AZT you are. How can a deadly cell-toxin conceivably make you feel better as it finishes you, by stopping your cells from dividing, by ending the vital process that distinguishes living things from dead things? Not for nothing does AZT come with a skull and cross-bones label when packaged for laboratory use. Here’s a typical experience of AZT; last year in September, several newspapers in the US and Canada ran a story KIDS WITH AIDS by Gayle Melvin: “Robert Swanson’s medicines came with horrible side-effects: nausea, diarrhea and blinding headaches… Robert would secretly skip a dose of medicine. ‘I’d find his pills all over the place, in his room, in the dirty clothes’, Britten says… ‘When you think of medicine, you think of something that makes you better, but I don’t feel better when I take it,’ Robert says. ‘I’d rather feel good and let the virus take over than feel bad and take the medicine.’ …Tina (takes) AZT,…ddC and Viracept, a protease inhibitor…three times a day. Then she waits to get sick. ‘My head will start to hurt all over, like a pounding. I get dizzy. Sometimes I throw up,’ she says in her sweet, girlish voice. She gets sick every time? ‘Every time’, says Tina… As they go through their teens, these children face (the) challenges (of) taking responsibility for their…often debilitating medical regimen.”

For an early clinical report of AZT poisoning: Dr Laura Bessen and her colleagues wrote a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine in March 1988 headed, Severe Polymyositis-like Syndrome Associated With Zidovudine Therapy of AIDS and ARC. They reported, “All patients had an insidious onset of myalgias, muscle tenderness, weakness, and severe muscle atrophy favouring the proximal muscle groups. Physical examinations revealed varying degrees of muscle weakness and grossly apparent atrophy. Weight loss due to muscle loss was uniformly noted; in one patient, the loss was a striking 18kg.” (A colleague of mine treated with AZT went this way. After just two months of AZT treatment, he lost most of his muscle mass, and died weighing 40kg.) Besson et al noted, “We did not observe this illness before zidovudine was available…” It sure wasn’t the HIV, because the doctors found that “the syndrome was ameliorated after the drug was stopped.”

Besson and her colleagues’ clinical observations were investigated and reported by Dalakas et al in 1990 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Comparing the myopathy (muscle wasting) caused by AZT with that presumed to be caused by HIV, they concluded that “long-term therapy with zidovudine can cause a toxic mitochondrial myopathy, which…is indistinguishable from the myopathy associated with primary HIV infection… Before 1986, when zidovudine (formerly called azidothymidine) was introduced, the number of patients with HIV-associated myopathy was small, and myopathy was considered a rare complication of HIV infection. During the past two years, an increasing number of patients receiving long-term zidovudine therapy have had myopathic symptoms such as myalgia (in up to 8 percent of patients), elevated serum creatine kinase levels (in up to 15 percent), and muscle weakness. These symptoms generally improve when zidovudine is discontinued.” Whether muscle wasting ever occurs among HIV-positives who avoid AZT and related drugs is doubtful: Coker et al reported in AIDS in 1991, “A clinically significant myopathy that precedes the development of zidovudine associated mitochondrial myopathy has been a rarity in our experience.”

In 1991, in Neuromuscular Disorders, Chariot and Gherardi reported, “Long term therapy with (AZT) can induce a toxic myopathy associated with mitochondrial changes.” Looking into biochemical mechanisms to account for the toxicity of AZT for mitochondrial DNA, Hayakawa et al reported their study of mice given AZT, in the journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications in 1991. They proposed “oxygen damage of mitochondrial DNA (to be) the primary cause of mitochondrial myopathy with AZT therapy (and emphasized that) it is urgently necessary to develop a remedy substituting this toxic substance, AZT.” The burden of these reports is plain: AZT rots your muscles. As it does so, the patient enjoys Martin’s “quality of life” as he inexorably slips away with the wasted appearance of an extermination-camp victim. AIDS then goes onto the death certificate, and the image of the white AIDS patient who horribly and mysteriously wastes away is reinforced in the popular consciousness, another AIDS case to chalk up to the statistical tally. (No one cared much about wasting in Africa, commonplace from time immemorial where poverty-linked tuberculosis, malaria and gut diseases are endemic, until its opportunities for research grants popped up when it was renamed ‘slim disease’ or AIDS.)

In his reply to my essay, Martin admits that AZT destroys bone marrow, but then hedges: HIV “may” be the real culprit. This is a tired old tale rehashed. Mercury and arsenic salts – doctors’ favourites for ages – poisoned the patient, whose death was then blamed on unbalanced humours or germs. That AZT destroys bone marrow is frankly declared by its manufacturer. So let’s not fudge. In 1987 Parkash reported in Annals of Internal Medicine, “Four patients with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, and a history of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia developed severe pancytopenia 12 to 17 weeks after the initiation of azidothymidine therapy. Partial bone marrow recovery was documented within 4 to 5 weeks (after discontinuation of AZT) in three patients, but no marrow recovery has yet occurred in one patient during the more than 6 months since AZT treatment was discontinued.” For AIDS doctors slow to the point, Dainiak et al spell it out in their 1988 paper in the British Journal of Haematology, entitled, 3’-Azido-3’-deoxythymidine inhibits proliferation in vitro of human haematopoietic progenitor cells. They reported, “Anaemia (during AZT therapy) appears to be due to bone marrow suppression.” Consistent with this, Costello reported in the same year, in the Journal of Clinical Pathology that, “Blood transfusion is often necessary in patients with AIDS, especially in those receiving AZT, a drug which produces severe anaemia in a proportion of recipients. Forty nine (36%) of 138 patients treated with AZT required blood transfusion at least once.” Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine confirms: “(AZT), used for treating (HIV), often causes severe megaloblastic anemia…caused by impaired DNA synthesis.”

AZT reaches and can destroy foetal bone marrow too. In the May 1998 issue of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Journal, Watson et al at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York reported the grim case of an HIV-negative baby born to a positive mother who had been treated with a HAART cocktail of AZT, 3TC and a protease inhibitor, suffering “high output congestive heart failure secondary to profound anemia.” The paediatricians excluded “infection, nutritional deficiencies, congenital leukemia and congenital red blood cell aplasia in the child” and considered the “cause of the life-threatening anemia in our infant…to be in utero erythroid marrow suppression by one or more of the antiretroviral agents administered to the mother.”

Martin alleges that “toxicity in most cases is reversible.” This optimistic jive is flatly contradicted by Mir and Costello, who reported their concern in The Lancet in 1988 that “bone marrow changes in patients on zidovudine seem not to be readily reversed when the drug is withdrawn. These findings have serious implications for the use of zidovudine in HIV positive but symptom-free individuals.”

As for the fabled power Martin claims for AZT to prevent pregnant women transmitting HIV to their foetuses, Bennet observed in AIDS/STD Health Promotion Exchange 1998 that, “At present, data regarding the effects of ZDV (AZT) use on vertical transmission rates are inconclusive and incomplete. In addition, the long-term effects of ZDV use during pregnancy and after birth on the woman and any resulting child are yet to be discovered. The possibility has not yet been ruled out that this ‘risk-reducing’ measure may not be effective and may prove detrimental to the health of both mother and child.”

Bennet’s caveat has moved from the hypothetical to the tragically real. In February, French researcher Stephane Blanche announced at the Sixth Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections that two babies in an AZT trial that he and colleagues were conducting had apparently been killed by the drug. Both had fallen sick at four months and had died of mitochondrial dysfunction and neurological defects – conditions ordinarily very rare. In September, in his paper in The Lancet entitled Persistent mitochondrial dysfunction and perinatal exposure to antiretroviral nucleoside analogues, he reported: “We analysed observations of a trial of tolerance of combined zidovudine and lamivudine and preliminary results of a continuing retrospective analysis of clinical and biological symptoms of mitochondrial dysfunction in children born to HIV-1-infected women in France…. Eight children had mitochondrial dysfunction. Five, of whom two died, presented with delayed neurological symptoms and three were symptom-free but had severe biological or neurological abnormalities. Four of these children had been exposed to combined zidovudine and lamivudine, and four to zidovudine alone. No child was infected with HIV-1… Our findings support the hypothesis of a link between mitochondrial dysfunction and the perinatal administration of prophylactic nucleoside analogues.….. Further assessment of the toxic effects of these drugs is required.” On the same theme, in the same issue of The Lancet, Dutch researchers Brinkman et al published a paper recording their view that AZT class drugs “are much more toxic than we considered previously.” Discussing the body-wasting characteristic of AZT-treated patients, they point out that, “The layer of fat-storing cells directly beneath the skin, which wastes away…is loaded with mitochondria… (O)ther common side effects of (AZT and like drugs are) nerve and muscle damage, pancreatitis and decreased production of blood cells… all resemble conditions caused by inherited mitochondrial diseases.”

American researchers (Culnane et al), who in January had claimed in the Journal of the American Medical Association that AZT appeared to be safe for babies, were incredulous when Blanche made his conference announcement. Which is odd, because a month earlier a paper in AIDS by Lorenzi et al at Hopital Cantonal Universitaire in Geneva reported that, “Following combination antiretroviral therapy administered during pregnancy, most HIV-positive mothers and about half of their children developed one or more adverse events.” Of thirty babies, “the most common adverse event was prematurity (ten infants), followed by anaemia (eight). The investigators also noted two cases of cutaneous angioma, two cases of cryptorchidism, and one case of transient hepatitis. Two infants…developed… intracerebral hemorrhage…(and one,)…extrahepatic biliary atresia.”

None of this is really surprising since as early as 1990, Gillet et al had reported in the Journal of Gynecology, Obstetrics, and Biological Reproduction that “concentrations of (AZT) in the liquor and in the fetal blood (of six aborted human foetuses) were higher or equaled those found in the maternal blood.” They reiterated accordingly, “The drug remains contra-indicated in pregnancy.” Not least because the FDA categorises AZT as a ‘C’-class drug for safety in pregnancy. With such drugs, it warns, “Safety in human pregnancy has not been determined, animal studies are either positive for fetal risk or have not been conducted, and the drug should not be used unless the potential benefit outweighs the potential risk to the fetus.”

In a paper published in Mutation Research in 1997, Argawal and Olivero reported, “AZT induces significant toxic effects in humans exposed to therapeutic doses… Cytogenetic observations on H9-AZT cells showed an increase in chromosomal aberrations and nuclear fragmentation when compared with unexposed H9 cells (and) the mechanisms of AZT induced cytotoxicity in bone marrow of the patients chronically exposed to the drug in vivo may involve both chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA damage.” This might explain Kumar et al’s 1994 report in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and Human Retrovirology of a shocking number of therapeutic and spontaneous abortions, and, of the live births, a ten per cent abnormality rate among one hundred and four cases of pregnant women treated with AZT in a hospital in India. The grotesque birth defects included holes in the chest, abnormal indentations at the base of the spine, misplaced ears, mis-shapen faces, heart defects, extra digits and albinism. Doesn’t the doctor’s Hippocratic promise not to administer poison apply anymore?

The danger for developing foetuses posed by the administration of AZT to pregnant mothers was highlighted in 1997 by Ha et al in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and Human Retrovirology in a paper entitled, Fetal, infant, and maternal toxicity of zidovudine (AZT) administered throughout pregnancy in Macaca nemestrina. The researchers reported, “The AZT animals (Macaque monkeys given AZT during pregnancy) developed an asymptomatic macrocytic anemia, but hematologic parameters returned to normal when AZT was discontinued. Total leukocyte count decreased during pregnancy and was further affected by AZT administration. AZT-exposed infants were mildly anemic at birth. AZT caused deficits in growth, rooting and snouting reflexes, and the ability to fixate and follow near stimuli visually.” The latter indications of neurological damage were anticipated in their 1994 paper in the same journal, Fetal toxicity of zidovudine in Macaca nemestrina: preliminary observations. They found that, “AZT-exposed infants took three times as many sessions (6) as controls (2) to meet criterion on Black-White Learning, a simple discrimination task (and were)…significantly (worse in locating) the reward…” That’s not all they found either: “Postnatal weight increase was significantly lower in AZT-exposed infants… Hemoglobin dropped significantly in the AZT-treated animals after treatment began and remained low until the end of the study… Platelet counts increased significantly in AZT-treated animals during the treatment period but returned to control levels before the end of the study… The mechanism for the elevation of platelet count in AZT-treated animals is unknown… The hematological toxicities reported here are consistent with those seen in 500 mg/day AZT-treated humans.” Incredibly, Connor et al in their piece (discussed in my first essay) Reduction of Maternal-Infant Transmission of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 with Zidovudine Treatment, the pitiful if hugely popular paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1994 propounding the administration of AZT to pregnant women, rely on Ha etal‘s just-mentioned 1994 monkey research report for the comforting conclusion, “Based on these findings, we predict that there would be no significant toxic effects of prenatal AZT exposure (100 mg/dose; 500 mg/day) in humans.” In the light of all that was already known about the acute toxicity of AZT, and it would be reinforced by later studies, what better illustration of Erasmus’ foresight in the 16thcentury that the dullest, most ignorant and incautious doctors would become the superstars of the AIDS age, and that for their experiments on pregnant women with cell-poisons they’d be not abjured but celebrated. On trial, no doubt, they would defend their science in radical ideological terms like the doctors at Nuremberg. The evil they perceived called for ruthless measures to root out, and in such struggles conventional civilised restraints on medical experiments on humans fall by the way.

As an advocate of AZT for HIV-positive children, Martin might like to venture an explanation for this: In a study in the US, designed by Dr. Janet Englwood, and sponsored by both the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, eight hundred and thirty nine HIV-positive children were divided into three groups and treated with AZT, ddI and a combination of both respectively. The ‘AZT alone’ wing of the study had to be abruptly called off in February 1995 due to the “more rapid rates of…bleeding and biochemical abnormalities” exhibited by the children in this group. For the answer, here’s a clue. In 1997, Benbrick et al reported a study by researchers at several French institutions in the Journal of Neurological Science; comparing AZT with other similar nucleoside analogue drugs used in AIDS treatment, they found that although “all (such drugs) exert cytotoxic effects on human muscle cells and induce functional alterations of mitochondria…AZT seemed to be the most potent inhibitor of cell proliferation.”

Consonant with this finding, in 1997 in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, Heresi et al reported fungal infestations (PCP) which developed in the lungs of two HIV-negative babies, born healthy, whose mothers had been treated with AZT followed by the babies themselves for six weeks. No mystery about it. Under the entry ‘Retrovir’ (AZT’s trade name), The Physician’s Desk Reference hints delicately, “It was often difficult (in AZT clinical trials) to distinguish adverse events possibly associated with administration of Retrovir from underlying signs of HIV disease or intercurrent illnesses.” In similar terms, the 16th edition of the manual USP DI: Drug Information for the Health Care Professional published in 1996 by the United States Pharmacopeial Convention states that “it is often difficult to differentiate between the manifestations of HIV infection (again presumed) and the manifestations of zidovudine. In addition, very little placebo controlled data is available to assess this difference.” To put a point on it, AZT itself can cause AIDS-defining illnesses. Its critics have been saying so for years. What else is one to make of Buchbinder et al’s finding reported in AIDS in 1994 that, “Only 38% of the HLP (healthy long-term (>10 years) positives) had ever used zidovudine or other nucleoside analogues, compared with 94% of the progressors”? Or Washington University’s Assistant Professor of Medicine Dr Carl Fichtenbaum’s observation about Mycobacterium avium complex disease in his article I Hear You Knockin’ in the magazine Research Initiative Treatment Action: “Mycobacterium avium complex disease is one of the most common OI’s in persons with advanced HIV disease. It has been observed in 15 to 40% of persons with HIV infection. The incidence of MAC began with AIDS reported to the CDC had MAC disease. Of note, the incidence increased from 5.7% in 1985-86 to 23.3% in 1989-90. Thus, MAC disease has become one of the most frequent OI events occurring in individuals with CD4+ lymphocyte counts <50 cells/mm3.” Funny how the disease incidence suddenly ballooned coincidentally with the introduction of AZT as an AIDS drug in 1986-7.

In the June issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Learmont et al report the interesting case of eight “transfusion recipients…infected with…HIV-1…from a single donor before 1985… Since then, two subjects died of causes unrelated to HIV-1 infection. The (cause of) death of one other subject, in 1987 (is indeterminate, and the five other) recipients are still asymptomatic 14 to 18 years after infection and have not received antiretroviral therapy.” Wonder of wonders. Likewise, in the July issue of the Journal of Medical Virology, Candotti et al‘s study of sixty eight ‘long term non-progressors mentions coincidentally that none were on “antiretroviral therapy”. This tallies with the observation of prominent AIDS researcher Dr Jay Levy, Professor of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, in The Lancet last year that “long-term survivors of HIV” have all avoided ‘antiretrovirals’. Similarly Dr Donald Abrams, Professor of Medicine and Director of the AIDS program at San Francisco General Hospital, noted in 1996: “I have a large population of people who have chosen not to take any antiretrovirals… I’ve been following them since the very beginning… They’ve watched all of their friends go on the antiviral bandwagon and die.”

In 1997, The Canadian Pharmaceutical Association noted, “The long-term consequences of in-utero and infant exposure to zidovudine are unknown. The long-term effects of early or short-term use of zidovudine in pregnant women are also unknown.” Likewise the US Centers for Disease Control’s April 1998 Guidelines for the Use of Antiretroviral Agents in Pediatric HIV Infection cautioned, “Data from clinical trials that address the effectiveness of antiretroviral therapy in asymptomatic infants and children with normal immune function are not available… The theoretical problems with early therapy include the potential for short- and long-term adverse effects, particularly for drugs being administered to infants aged <6 months, for whom information on pharmacokinetics, drug dosing, and safety is limited…(and) clinical trial data documenting therapeutic benefit from (antiretroviral therapy) are not available.”

However, in his paper in AIDS in May, Rapid disease progression in HIV-1 perinatally infected children born to mothers receiving zidovudine monotherapy during pregnancy, Professor de Martino, Coordinator of the Italian Register of HIV Infected Children at the Department of Paediatrics, University of Florence in Italy reports that, “Comparison of HIV-1-infected children whose mothers were treated with ZDV with children whose mothers were not treated showed that the former (AZT treated) group had a higher probability of developing severe disease [57.3%…versus 37.2%]…or severe immune suppression [53.9%…versus 37.5%…] and a lower survival (rate) [72.2%…versus 81.0%…].” How does this square up with Martin’s urging that AZT be given to pregnant women for the benefit of their children? In similar vein, in her jolly piece in the San Francisco Examiner on 31 May, Thailand wins a round against HIV, Karen Emmons reports, “Of the children who were born HIV-positive in Bangkok in the past four years and received the combination drug treatment (AZT and ddI)…one-fourth died in their first year, about 33 percent by their second year, 40 percent by age 3, and then the mortality tapered off.” This is a medical victory? On these data, a critical journalist might have reported an iatrogenic drug disaster.

That’s just what some observers think AIDS in the US largely to have been, and if one looks at the CDC’s AIDS mortality figures read against the frequency of AZT use there, it’s not hard to see why. AIDS deaths trebled between 1988 and 1989 with the recommendation that AZT be given to asymptomatic HIV-positives; they rose steadily by 1994/5 to fifteen times what they had been prior to the introduction of AZT as an AIDS drug in 1986/7, and then fell precipitously – by 1997 to less than half of the 1994/5 death rate following the abandonment of AZT-monotherapy in favour of ‘combination therapy’, still toxic but not as immediately so. The peculiar part of it is that having been found to be too poisonous and ineffective as a monotherapy for adults by 1994, AZT should thereafter be commended for babies in utero.

One would think that all this would give pause to doctors plying this drug on pregnant women, but not in the debased scientific atmosphere of the AIDS era. One wonders whether the First Precept of the Nuremberg Code – informed consent – formulated after the Nazi medical experience, is ever observed with such dangerous experimental treatment. Any bets on whether these women are told, for instance, of Olivero et al’s report in 1997 in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and Human Retrovirology bluntly headed, AZT is a Genotoxic Transplacental Carcinogen in Animal Models? The researchers reported that, “In newborn monkeys and mice, AZT was incorporated into DNA of many fetal tissues… AZT appears to be a moderately-strong transplacental carcinogen… (and in) adult mice, lifetime AZT administration induces vaginal tumors at a 10-20% incidence.” Or of the same researchers’ other paper in 1997 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute entitledTransplacental effects of 3’-azido-2’,3’-dideoxythymidine: tumorigenicity in mice and genotoxicity in mice and monkeys? In the light of earlier rodent studies which found AZT “to be carcinogenic in adult mice after lifetime oral administration”, the research team, all scientists with the US National Cancer Institute, were concerned to assess “thetransplacental tumorigenic and genotoxic effects of AZT in the offspring of…mice and…monkeys given AZT orally during pregnancy.” Pregnant mice and monkeys were given AZT in the second halves of their gestational terms. After exposure to AZT in the womb, the offspring of these animals were not further treated. By one year of age, the mice exposed to AZT in utero “exhibited statistically significant, dose-dependent increases in tumor incidence and tumor multiplicity in the lungs, liver, and female reproductive organs. AZT incorporation into nuclear and mitochondrial DNA was detected in multiple organs of transplacentally exposed mice and monkeys. Shorter chromosomal telomeres were detected in liver and brain tissues from most AZT-exposed newborn mice but not in tissues from fetal monkeys.” The researchers concluded, “AZT is genotoxic in fetal mice and monkeys and is a moderately strong transplacental carcinogen in mice examined at 1 year of age. Careful long-term follow-up of AZT-exposed children would seem to be appropriate.” Since, “AZT is unequivocally a transplacental genotoxin and carcinogen (and) given transplacentally to mice, benzopyrene produced lung and liver tumour multiplicities similar to those observed (with AZT)”, the researchers recorded their concern that “the current practice of treating HIV-positive women and their infants with high doses of AZT could increase cancer risk in the drug-exposed children when they reach young adulthood or middle age.”

Nor does it seem very likely that HIV-positive pregnant women will be told of Olivero etal’s paper in AIDS in May, reporting the research of a major collaborative investigation by several institutions in the US, overseen by The National Cancer Institute: In view of the just-mentioned 1997 animal research findings, the researchers were concerned to establish whether their observations applied to humans, that is, whether AZT administered to HIV positive pregnant women was incorporated into their DNA and that of their babies. It was found that it was. The ramifications of this for the potential human carcinogenicity of AZT were conveyed in the researchers’ recommendation that “the biologic significance of ZDV-DNA damage and potential subsequent events, such as mutagenicity, should be further investigated in large cohorts of HIV-positive individuals (because)…these data raise the possibility that the presence of extensive ZDV incorporation into human DNA may be cumulative, with potential long-term consequences such as mutagenicity and tumorigenicity.”

And it sure would be surprising were these women – advised to go on a bracing ‘short course’ of AZT treatment – to be told about Olivero’s paper in Mutation Research in July: 3’-azido-3’-deoxythymidine transplacental perfusion kinetics and DNA incorporation in normal human placentas in similar terms perfused with AZT: Olivero and Poirier of the Laboratory of Cellular Carcinogenesis and Tumor Promotion, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, USA, and Parikka and Vahakangas of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Oulu, Finland. Concerned because “transplacental exposure studies demonstrated that AZT is a moderate to strong transplacental carcinogen in mice (and) the consequences of transplacental AZT exposure to the fetus remain unknown”, the researchers investigated “the extent and kinetics of AZT transfer across the human placenta.” They reported, “Since AZT crosses the human placenta and becomes rapidly incorporated (within 2 hours of AZT perfusion) into DNA of placental tissue in a dose-dependent fashion, (this suggests) that even short exposures to this drug might induce fetal genotoxicity… In previous studies AZT has been shown to produce both large-scale DNA damage and point mutations. Skin tumors induced in mice by transplacental AZT initiation and subsequent topical promotion had mutations in Ha-ras Exon I codons 12 and 13, but these mutations were not observed in liver and lung tumors from mice given the same exposure. The fact that the recommended treatment involves AZT use for the last 6 months of pregnancy, suggest that human fetuses may also sustain AZT-DNA damage… (T)he consequences of any fetal exposure to a nucleoside analog, in utero, remain unknown and a long-term follow up of children prenatally exposed seems to be appropriate.”

Reporting to the US Surgeon General in 1970, the Ad Hoc Committee on the Evaluation of Low Levels of Environmental Chemical Carcinogens recommended, “Any substance which is shown conclusively to cause tumors in animals should be considered carcinogenic and therefore a potential cancer hazard for man… No level of exposure to a chemical carcinogen should be considered toxicologically insignificant for man. For carcinogenic agents a ‘safe level for man’ cannot be established by application of our present knowledge…” Have the rules changed? Is AZT too big to ban (under the Delaney Amendment outlawing potentially carcinogenic drugs in the US)? Or are the rules about exposing patients to likely carcinogens just relaxed a bit when they are female and pregnant? Or black or gay?

In fact the likely carcinogenicity of AZT, demonstrated by these recent studies, is no news at all. Way back in December 1986, a review of numerous AZT studies entitled Review & Evaluation of Pharmacology & Toxicology Data was submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration by its in-house toxicology analyst Dr Harvey Chernov. He reported – apart from the observation that AZT was toxic to bone marrow and caused anaemia in all species (of experimental animal) including man – that AZT “was found weakly mutagenic in vitro in the mouse lymphoma cell system. Dose-related chromosome damage was observed in an in vitro cytogenetic assay using human lymphocytes”, and AZT was found to be active in the Cell Transformation Assay, a stock test for carcinogenic potential. He emphasized, “This BALB/c-3T3 neoplastic transformation assay was performed according to standard operating procedure. Concentrations of AZT as low as 0.1 mcg/ml reduced the number of cells in culture after a 3-day exposure. A statistically significant increase in the number of aberrant ‘foci’ was noted at concentration of 0.5 mcg/ml. This behaviour is characteristic of tumor cells and suggests that AZT may be a potential carcinogen. It appears to be at least as active as the positive control material, methylcholanthrene.” As Chernov explains it, “A test chemical which induces a positive response in the Cell Transformation Assay is presumed to be a potential carcinogen.” Naturally he advised the FDA against approving AZT, but his report was buried. Indeed, it had to be flushed out of the FDA’s files by resort to the machinery of the federal Freedom of Information Act, some years later.

Chernov’s bleak predictions have since been realised. But you’d never know it reading the tortured spin of AZT promoters Broder et al in their piece, Clinical Pharmacology of 3′-Dideoxythymidine and Related Dideoxynucleosides, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1989. Conceding that “it is of particular concern that the drug may be carcinogenic or mutagenic” and “its long term effects are unknown”, the authors state, “zidovudine may be associated with a higher incidence of cancers in patients whose immunosurveillance mechanisms are disturbed simply because it increases their longevity.” Just muse on that as a vignette illustrating the quality of reasoning exhibited by AIDS scientists, and then before you dry your eyes, dig this – from the same illustrious peer-reviewed journal: In 1988, Pizzo et al claimed that AZT boosted the IQ points of twenty one HIV-positive children by fifteen points. In declaiming these AZT-boosted “neurodevelopmental” improvements, the excited researchers relegated the deaths of five of the children on AZT to a passing mention. But not even that for the dead children when Glaxo-Wellcome seized on and punted this garbage as a selling hook when advertising AZT in The Lancet.

Actually, AZT doesn’t make you clever, it makes you stupid. You may have heard of ‘AIDS-dementia’. It’s like ‘neuro-syphilis’ – which no one gets anymore, now that penicillin has taken over from arsenic and mercury salts to kill syphilis spirochaetes. To be told by a doctor that you’re about to die would knock the best of us off the psychological rails. Certainly I’ve seen this in two AIDS-based cases I’m conducting. (At the least of it, the diagnosis per se can precipitate a health collapse, as a glance at Ader, Felten and Cohen’s text, Psychoneuroimmunology will confirm.) Bacellar et al reported in the journal Neurology in 1994 that “the risk of developing HIV dementia among those reporting any antiretroviral use (AZT, ddI, ddC, or d4T) was 97% higher than among those not using this antiretroviral therapy… In addition, the findings of our analysis seem to confirm previous observation of a neurotoxic effect of antiretroviral agents…linked…to the development of toxic sensory neuropathies, usually in a dose-response fashion.” Remember the sensory and mental disturbances mentioned above on the package blurb as being among AZT’s ‘side-effects’? You know, the ones caused by the poisoning of your nerves and brain? Heald et al mentioned some of them in their paper in AIDS in 1998, Taste and smell complaints in HIV-infected patients. In a discussion of mitochondrial myopathy, Robbin’s Pathologic Basis of Disease mentions mitochondrial encephalomyopathy. The Concise Oxford Medical Dictionary tells us that encephalomyopathy is “extensive destruction of nerve cells throughout the nervous system (causing) widespread disease of brain and spinal cord.”

In the May issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Fichtenbaum et al at the Washington University School of Medicine describe the cases of three patients who developed progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy after four to eleven months of HAART. Despite a change in their treatment, the research team “observed no improvement (in two of the cases)… Neurologic deterioration continued, and (the) patients died within 2 months.” They concluded that the condition can “develop while using HAART” notwithstanding test results suggesting “a good virologic response to antiretroviral therapy.” That the drugs themselves caused the brain and neurological damage, they didn’t consider. Apparently Fichtenbaum and his portly pals found the logical leap too wide to hazard. But not Research Initiative Treatment Action in their piece headed Just Sweat it Out: Physical therapy’s role in the HIV pandemic under the chapter, The Nervous System and Physical Therapy: “Peripheral neuropathy pain, which occurs in 40 to 60% of people with AIDS, is one of the most common causes for referral to physical therapy and is often one of the most neglected. Symptoms of peripheral neuropathy include burning, numbness, and/or a tingling sensation of the extremities. Lower extremity involvement is more common than upper extremity involvement. Problems with ambulation, balance, and compensatory low back pain are also commonly associated with peripheral neuropathy.” Since there isn’t a jot of evidence that HIV attacks nerve cells, but ample evidence that nucleoside analogues like AZT, 3TC, d4T, ddI and ddC do, the article concedes that “peripheral neuropathy may be directly related to (such) pharmacological agents…”

If it’s not good for your head, AZT’s not great for your heart either. Lipshultz pointed out in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1998 that “possible mechanisms (for heart muscle disease among HIV-positive patients) include cardiotoxicity as a result of antiretroviral therapy…” And in their paper in Nature Medicine in 1995, Mitochondrial toxicity of antiviral drugs, Lewis and Dalakas mention heart disease among the many manifestations of drug toxicity caused by ‘antiviral’ nucleoside analogues (ANAs) like AZT: “(T)he prevalent and at times serious ANA mitochondrial toxic side-effects are particularly broad ranging with respect to their tissue target and mechanisms of toxicity: Haematalogical; Myopathy; Cardiotoxicity; Hepatic toxicity; Peripheral neuropathy.”

It would appear that AZT and chemically related drugs can blind you too. In the Journal of Infectious Diseases inMarch, Karavellas and Plumm reported their investigation of “the likelihood of the development of a new ocular inflammatory syndrome (immune recovery vitritis, IRV), which causes vision loss in AIDS patients with cytomegalovirus (CMV) retinitis, who respond to HAART. We followed 30 HAART-responders with CD4 cell counts of >/=3D60 cells/mm3. Patients were diagnosed with IRV if they developed symptomatic vitritis of >/=3D1+ severity associated with inactive CMV retinitis. Symptomatic IRV developed in 19 (63%) of 30 patients…over a median follow-up from HAART response of 13.5 months… These data suggest that IRV develops in a significant number of HAART-responders with CMV retinitis…” It’s amazing. Some ‘successfully’ treated AIDS patients go blind. A brand-new disease construct comes into being: ‘Immune Recovery Vitritis’. Roche hawks its ‘anti-CMV medication’, with advertising directed specifically at gay men whose sight has been wrecked by drug damage to their ocular nerves. In an echo of the Japanese Clioquinol disaster, cytomegalovirus is blamed for the blindness, not the HAART drugs, notwithstanding their well-established neuro-toxicity.

During a polio-like epidemic in the sixties and early seventies in Japan, Subacute Myelo-Optico-Neuropathy or S.M.O.N. caused blindness, paralysis and death in thousands of cases. The Japanese medical research establishment approached the crisis on the footing that some new unknown infectious agent was responsible. Echo-, Coxsackie- and lenti-viruses were put in the dock in turn. Professor Shigeyuki Inoue at Kyoto University’s Institute for Virus Research claimed that a virus he had identified (coincidentally in the same herpes-class as the common-place and generally harmless cytomegalovirus) was the cause of S.M.O.N., and it was accepted as such in the 1974 edition of the American textbook, Review of Medical Microbiology. With modern medicine’s bias to germs as the causes of disease, entirely overlooked was the possibility that the epidemic was caused not by a contagion but by a toxin – until the epidemiological anomalies became uncontainable for the viral culprit theory. Finally, an anti-diarrhoereal drug Clioquinol was found to be the cause. Inadequately tested, it turned out to be neuro-toxic. When it was banned, the plague ceased, and in the litigation that followed its manufacturer Ceiba-Geigy was taken to the cleaners.

But back to cancer. Pluda and colleagues, all researchers with the US National Cancer Institute, no less, reported in 1990 in Annals of Internal Medicine that on AZT, your chances of developing lymphoma relative to the rest of the population went up 50 fold: “The estimated probability of developing (Non-Hodgkin) lymphoma (in patients taking AZT alone, or in combination) by 30 months of therapy was 28.6% and by 36 months, 46.4%.” The authors considered “a direct role of therapy itself” for the development of the disease, and warned, “Zidovudine can act as a mutagen.”

In the light of these reports, is it truthful for AZT manufacturer Glaxo-Wellcome to persist with the assertion, as it does in its AZT package insert that, “It is not known how predictive the results of rodent carcinogenicity studies may be for humans”? After all, “At doses that produced tumors in mice and rats, the estimated drug exposure (for mice) …was (only about) 3 times…the estimated human exposure at the recommended therapeutic dose of 100 mg every 4 hours.” And how frank is Glaxo-Wellcome in disposing of Chernov’s positive Cell Transformation Assay findings with the bald unelaborated statement in the same package insert, “In an in vitro mammalian cell transformation assay, zidovudine was positive at concentrations of 0.5 µg/ml and higher”? How many doctors, let alone patients, appreciate from this that as little as half a millionth of a gram per millilitre of AZT came up positive in a standard drug-industry screening-test for potential drug carcinogenicity? And what risks for patients this portends?

In AIDS in May, Grulich et al report a 16 year study of cancer incidence among people given an AIDS diagnosis in New South Wales, Australia. The researchers noted that among more than 3600 AIDS diagnoses, fully one quarter of the patients had developed cancers including those of lung, skin and lip, leukaemia and Hodgkins Disease – none of which are ‘AIDS indicator diseases’. “There was an increased incidence of several other forms of cancer, some of which are known to occur at increased rates in transplant recipients who have received immunosuppressive therapy.” Presumably these patients had been dosed according to the standard ‘antiretroviral’ treatment protocol – AZT alone or in combination with related drugs. All of which, like ‘immunosuppressive therapy’, are destructive of the cells of the immune system. They report, “The incidence of Hodgkin’s Disease increased significantly at the time of AIDS diagnosis.” Since the disease sets in after the diagnosis is made and the treatment begins, the sensible doctor might wonder about the medicine. Such enquiry might be stimulated by Zietz et al‘s paper in June in the New England Journal of Medicine reporting An unusual cluster of cases of Castleman’s disease during highly active antiretroviral therapy for AIDS. Most patients with this “rare… lymphatic hyperplasia…disease” typically present with “multicentric lymphadenopathy… an interfollicular predominance of plasma cells… and progressive systemic symptoms or with a more localized, indolent disease that can often be cured by local excision.” In the four cases reported, the patients suffered “(f)ever, weakness, generalized enlargement of lymph nodes, and marked polyclonal gammopathy… (and three) died within a week after the diagnosis.” Speculating about the possible causes – the virus HHV-8 is tentatively mooted – the authors note that in all cases “symptoms of multicentric Castleman’s disease started after the initiation of highly active antiretroviral therapy…” Sure they did.

Debunking Martin’s claims as to the efficacy of AZT for “post-exposure prophylaxis” would take more space than the joke warrants. Put it this way. There are no smart-bomb drugs for viruses. Probably never will be. If there were, we wouldn’t have to put up with colds and ‘flu any more. Geddit?! As Nobel Laureate retrovirologist and Director of the US National Institutes of Health, Dr. Harold Varmus summed it up in June last year, “Trying to rid the body of a virus whose genome is incorporated into the host genome may be impossible.” Any honest, competent GP will tell you that viruses are beyond Medicine’s reach. With viral diseases you take it easy and hope for the best. Presuming of course you have the disease you’ve been told you do, but just what HIV antibody test results really tell is another story, and what an unbelievable scientific shambles it is.

Schmitz etal’s paper Side effects of AZT prophylaxis after occupational exposure to HIV-infected blood in Annals of Hematology in 1994 might dampen the ardour of AZT ‘post exposure prophylaxis’ proponents: AZT was supplied to fourteen health care workers “exposed to HIV contaminated blood through needle sticks and similar accidents.” Three abandoned the treatment early because of its unendurable toxicity. Eleven held the course for a month. Four of them developed severe neutropenia. One developed a lung infection. The study itself was called off early before more harm was done. Robbins’ pathology text explains: “The symptoms and signs of neutropenias are those of bacterial infections (and) the most severe forms of neutropenias are produced by drugs.” Hello?

Following the rape recently of prominent South African AIDS journalist Charlene Smith, an intense debate currently rages in the media here about a related issue: whether the State ought to provide AZT and related drugs to rape victims. However the US Centers for Disease Control, the font et origo of most conventional wisdom about AIDS, is not on the side of its protagonists. In CDC Update, dated 29 Sept 1998, it warned, “Potential benefits must be weighed against the risks of drug toxicity (and) the difficulty of compliance with the regimen… Because post-exposure is an experimental therapy of unproven efficacy, it should only be prescribed with the informed consent of the patient, after explanation of the potential benefits and risks. Antiretroviral therapy should never be used routinely…” This advice was based on the conclusions of a conference of experts convened to examine the matter on 24-25 July 1997 in Atlanta. The report of this External Consultants’ Meeting on Antiretroviral Therapy for Potential Nonoccupational Exposures to HIV recorded that “no data currently exist about the effectiveness of such therapy for these types of exposures… There are no human studies of antiretroviral drug therapy for sexual, drug use, or other non-occupational exposures to HIV… Potential benefits have to be weighed against the significant health risks and costs associated with this therapy for nonoccupational exposures. First, these medications can have severe side effects… Second, efficacy is unknown… This therapy should never be routine. It is… complicated…(and) is NOT a ‘morning-after pill’.”

Charlene Smith recently reported Amy Brown’s experience of ‘antiretroviral therapy’ in the Mail and Guardian (15 October). Five months after being raped she came up positive to an HIV antibody test. “I was eleven weeks pregnant and the doctor said Retrovir (AZT) and 3TC are not approved for pregnancy but you have to take it. I lost the baby a week later.” Any wonder?

Finally, for AZT, a ringing epitaph. In June, in a special supplement to the journal Current Medical Research and Opinion, Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al publish an extensive critical analysis of the pharmacology of AZT*. It’s a monumental document (30 000 words) and it explodes all pretensions that AZT has ever had to having any therapeutic value. Reviewing all the principal medical literature on AZT, both early and current, the authors demonstrate that there is “no…evidence” to support early claims that AZT disrupts the “HIV replication cycle by a selective inhibition of viral reverse transcriptase thereby preventing the formation of new pro-viral DNA in permissive, uninfected cells”, that AZT is not triphosphorylated to any significant extent in vivo when administered to patients – a process all HIV experts agree is essential to prevent the formation of pro-viral HIV DNA – and that AZT is incapable of exerting an anti-HIV effect accordingly. On the other hand, the paper mentions “a number of bio-chemical mechanisms (elucidated in the scientific literature) which predicate the likelihood of widespread, serious toxicity for the use of this drug.” The authors wonder, “Based on all these data it is difficult if not impossible to explain why AZT was introduced and still remains the most widely recommended and used anti-HIV drug.” They conclude that the continued administration of AZT “either alone or in combination…to HIV sero-positive or AIDS patients warrants urgent revision.” This indictment of AZT ought to be its death knell in clinical practice. No doctor whose adult or infant patient sickens or dies on AZT will be safe from damages actions founded on medical negligence after this.

It took four centuries before Medicine finally recognised that Calomel (mercurous chloride) couldn’t cure, only kill, and dumped it from its pharmacopoeia. Until then, notwithstanding its manifest poisonousness, doctors had advocated it, some with poetic fervour, as a panacea for gout, headache, menstrual pain, syphilis, and no end of other ailments. No modern doctor, especially any who has seen that ghastly clip of Japanese families crippled by mercury poisoning in Minamata Bay in the fifties, or our own recent victims – former workers at the Thor mercury-waste ‘reprocessing’ plant in KwaZulu-Natal – would dream of ladling mercury salts down their patients’ throats nowadays. When is the penny going to drop with AZT?

The repackaging of lethal cell-poisons like AZT as ‘anti-retrovirals’ is a vast and vicious pharmaceutical fraud. But as a Greek Cynic noted appositely a couple of millennia ago, the law has always been a web in which small flies get caught; the great ones burst through.

For any number of obvious reasons it would probably be disquieting to folk at large to discover that Mother Theresa – to employ a fanciful illustration – had kept a Swiss bank account. One would imagine that the honesty of men working at the frontiers of science in that hazy twilight terrain between the known and the unknown, the certain and the speculative, would count for quite a bit as well. Particularly where their pontifications, theories, and advices have the potential both to reap magnificent honours and riches, and very directly affect us dumb fucks out in the laity who sit at the feet of these guys and crave as much of their wisdom as we can get. And especially in a time of a perceived medical emergency, or during the rise of an hysterical epidemic, fuelled by a medieval fear of tainted blood and poisoned semen – and now evil mothers’ milk – in which we look up with frightened eyes to these secular sages for deliverance from tiny invisible enemies which we are told beset us. Mostly when enjoying our favourite recreation.

Science at its outer limits is populated by no end of ambitious cowboys of modest acumen hungry for fame, glory and the Ferraris in which some of their lucky chums in bio-tech cruise out of their labs’ parking lots in the direction of their Cessna hangars. They live so to speak in remote Wild West towns with lamentably few marshals to keep an eye on things. These are the left-overs too mediocre to cut it in university environments who wind up in homes for scientific dullards like the politically powerful health bureaucracies of the National Institutes of Health and The Centres for Disease Control in the USA. As we’ve all seen, when these oracles mumble, press trumpets blare and the entire world eagerly gobbles up every word, without demur. Notwithstanding how many fake health crises they have delivered still-born into the popular consciousness, like the idle Herpes scare in the 70’s, the phantom Syphilis epidemic in the 30’s and 40’s, the great Swine Flu fiasco in the 60’s, and that shining emblem of medical idiocy, the Pellagra plague in the first four decades of this century, treated inter alia with arsenic and ruthless quarantine, which turned out to be plain malnutrition among the politically awkward droves of poor white crackers in deep south industrial towns.

We need contagious epidemics to fight. Even imagined ones. They’re tremendously psychologically useful. Germ theory so dominates contemporary medicine that it seeks germs everywhere, the more virulent the better, and especially if they can be linked to our culture’s great taboos, sex and death. Anything to avoid facing up to unappealing political realities like widespread chronic undernourishment among a shameful number of our countrymen as the time-honoured and common-sense cause of broken health. Or, at the other pole, for those of us felicitously occupying the higher orders, factors inextricably tied to the excesses of our culture of affluence.

Of course, the loftier the degree of scientific specialisation, the sharper the point of the pyramid, the smaller and remoter the frontier town, and the fewer the guys with badges. As in a funny little corner of theoretical (some say virtual) virology called retrovirology – served at the commencement of the AIDS era by only a handful of labs run by the same guys who’d lost the “war on cancer” declared by Nixon in 1971, by putting all their money, and 40 billion of their country’s, on the perfectly ridiculous theory that cancer was an infectious condition caused by viruses.

Folk inclined to the view that a reasonable degree of personal integrity is essential to serve as a brake on the perennial temptation tickling largely unpoliced scientists at the frontiers of their specialisations to make extravagant claims with fabulous commercial potential beyond those which their data really support might be put out to learn that the pope of AIDS is a complete scum-bag.

This is Robert Gallo, who told the worried world at a US Health Department-convened press conference on 23 April 1984, before the publication of any paper for his fellows to assess, that he’d discovered the cause, a virus he said, of the poor health that a narrow subset of gay men with ruinous lifestyles were experiencing, later christened, in a flourish of conceptual surplusage, the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Having sneaked through a patent application on the blood test he’d devised for his claimed viral culprit ahead of the previously lodged French one, thus guaranteeing him a fortune in royalties, Gallo went on to publish four papers in the prestigious if dowdy journal Science two weeks later. Then the trouble started: an exuberant international disputation over who stole the fake diamonds. For Gallo this was the Paula trouble that led to Monica.

Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in France complained that the samples containing what he believed to be his newly spotted virus and which he’d trustingly sent Gallo had been flagrantly ripped off. He sued across the sea. Gallo brazenly counter-charged his accuser. It was embarrassing for the US administration to have its premier AIDS scientist accused of theft and fraud, but with the help of a gang of lawyers hired to fudge the facts and conceal boxes of crucial discoverable documents, Gallo got off – by dint of a neat political compromise agreeing a history, cosigned by no less than the presidents of the respective republics, Reagan and Chirac, in terms of which these two giants of modern biology were henceforth to be deemed co-discoverers of the AIDS virus.

The sham began unraveling almost immediately. A trouble-making investigative journalist on the Chicago Tribune, John Crewdson, began sticking his nose in. He went to print with a comprehensively researched expose spilling the beans on Gallo’s theft of Luc Montagnier’s samples, even his photographs of them. Hardly able to do otherwise, Gallo’s bosses in the National Institutes of Health instigated an enquiry with Yale biochemist Frederic Richards as overseer. Reviewing the four seminal research papers upon which the entire HIV-AIDS causation paradigm is founded – if feebly – the inquiry found fraud, a discrepancy between what had been reported and what had been done. The NIH watered it down, finding Gallo to his relief and the irritation of Richards, guilty merely of “creating and fostering conditions that gave rise to falsified/fabricated data and falsified reports”. This loyal whitewash was promptly criticized by Richards and by Senator John Dingle, who had got wind of the corruption in Gallo’s laboratory, and had begun his own investigation under the aegis of his Sub-Committee on Oversights and Investigations of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The Department of Health’s Office of Research Integrity reviewed the NIH report and disagreed with the cop-out. It had no trouble finding Gallo guilty of scientific misconduct, the gravest possible verdict, and a capital offence in career terms. So did the Dingle Committee in its draft report. Facing criminal prosecution for the perjury adorning his patent application, Gallo was forced to leave the National Institutes of Health in disgrace. On the scandal festered, until 1993, when happily for Gallo, it all went away. The government dropped the patent charges, and of fraudulently making a misstatement in a scientific journal and failing to credit the work of other researchers in claiming it as his own. Why? Because, a review board, comprising lawyers naturally, not scientists, had raised the bar in asserting a brand-new revised definition of scientific misconduct, which Gallo’s prosecutors in the Office of Research Integrity doubted they could clear. Unlike Sol Kerzner who kept his head down when the bribery case against him was dropped, Gallo boasted complete vindication.

Before making becoming famous for HIV, Gallo’s laboratory had been found by a panel of university scientists appointed in 1974 to be one of the worst offenders in the scandalous abuse of federal funds received during the Cancer War. Two co-researchers were later gaoled for embezzlement.

*** (missing text) the founding papers of the most powerful, all-pervasive and terrifying medical model of our time, the HIV-AIDS-causation hypothesis. No wonder the Nobel committee has set its face against the whole stinking shambles. Yet its integrity is assumed as an indisputable fact of contemporary science in the almost one hundred thousand papers in the subject that have been published since. Those critics making a living in the scientific establishment who point a finger at the emperor’s pink arse do so at immense professional and personal risk, and for some, at terrible cost. But there’s another story.

Curiously, the Office of Research Integrity found that the fraud tainting Gallo’s claim-to-fame papers did not affect the validity of the papers’ main conclusions, even though some of the key research work was described as “of dubious scientific merit”, and “really crazy”. Suffice it to say that others who have meticulously scrutinized Gallo’s original HIV research claims – allowing for the purpose of reviewing them that the dubious research data is sound – have found them to be, well, shall we say troubling. The adventurous leap between the papers’ contents and their headings for starters. But that’s another yarn still.

Gallo’s disgraceful behaviour in relation to his AIDS research was no first. Had he not ascended to such power and influence within the federal health bureaucracy, it is likely that his claims to have found a single infectious cause for the disparate diseases grouped together as AIDS in the early 1980’s would have been laughed out of court. After all, this was the bright spark who, with almost as much fanfare as that at his flash-bulb popping HIV press announcement, had loudly touted his discovery of what he claimed to be the first identified human retrovirus, HL23V, in the mid 70’s. After another look, this exciting find turned out to be nothing of the kind, just an accidental laboratory artefact. His laboratory hadn’t done the most basic controls. To his great embarrassment, Gallo had to retract his fancy claims, and HL23V then modestly retired as a virus from the scientific lexicon.

As the last misfired shots were going off in the failed cancer war – staged largely around the viral-cancer hypothesis – and it had become irresistibly plain to everyone that cancer had nothing to do with germs, and the whole thing had been a monumental waste of money, Gallo and his mates (known in-house as the Bob Club) sought new funding opportunities for their imminently redundant laboratories. Ever eager to position himself where the action was, he began punting another retrovirus which he claimed to have discovered, HTLV1, as the possible cause of the odd diseases like Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Pneumocystitis Carinii Pneumonia suddenly appearing to ail urban fast-track life-style gay men in San Francisco and New York. The virus had in fact been identified by biologists in Gallo’s lab, principally Poiesz and Ruscetti, not Gallo, but true to form he appropriated the discovery and took the accolades. Wanting the virus to be all things, the theory that HTLV1 could be responsible for AIDS was ludicrous. He had previously claimed this virus, again on absurd grounds, to be the cause of a rare form of Leukaemia, which amounts to disorderly immune cell replication, not premature cell death. “One of the most exciting stories of twentieth century biology” he gushed. Nobel laureate Kary Mullis thinks it “a joke”. The virus had first been posited to be a cell division stimulant, not a killer. Obviously, Gallo’s new converse role for HTLV1 went up like a lead balloon, but it didn’t matter, because it wasn’t long afterwards that Montagnier sent Gallo his samples, and we know the rest. In cravenly seeking the imprimatur of Big American Science, by seeking the endorsement for his work of an abject rogue, Montagnier naively left his keys in the ignition, and the next thing it was gone. Gallo resprayed Montagnier’s LAV as HTLVIII. It was later renamed HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, on the basis of Gallo’s claims, without proof to warrant its fearsome title. (Unless one thinks that correlations disclose proofs of causation. As if sparrows sometimes seen on telephone cables cause crossed lines.)

Whether HIV (or rather the minute biological traces said to evidence its presence) actually lives up to its frightening billing, is something Gallo can’t seem to make up his mind about. This ought to come as some comfort to those who live in wait for the clatter of the hangman’s key. Once insisting that HIV “kills like a truck”, and “would kill Clark Kent”, he now concedes, “We don’t know that 100 percent of people infected with HIV will die with AIDS. We don’t know that. We shouldn’t be predicting that, and it could even precipitate suicide. They shouldn’t have put that on the front page (of the Washington Post), even if it were true. But the fact is that we just don’t know”. In 1995, The Pasteur Institute’s Simon Wain-Hobson confessed, “An intrinsic cytopathic effect of the virus is no longer feasible”. The biggest medical research effort in history has found HIV to be biologically inactive. Gallo has tried weaseling out of the difficulty created by this humbling observation by suggesting “cofactors” might be involved in AIDS, since HIV can’t do any mischief on its own. (David Ho’s opposite assertions in 1996 have imploded on his childish mathematical errors.) Gallo had lots to say about a virus called HHV8 for a while, implicated as a “co-factor” in the development of that signal AIDS condition Kaposi’s Sarcoma, but like all other exciting breakthroughs in AIDS research, it has proved to be just another flash in the pan. Worse still, it is now generally accepted, and by Gallo too, that those horrible skin blotches have nothing to do with HIV at all.

At last count, our charming charlatan was on SABC TV a few months ago, singing his own praises for his alleged breakthrough anti-HIV protein HAF, distilled from the urine of women with child. About which we have heard nothing since. Naturally, since it was just another rodeo stunt. Gallo’s new laboratory in Baltimore had produced nothing to show for the millions he had duped state and municipal authorities into giving him, and was about to have its plug pulled by the Maryland legislature accordingly. A neatly timed “very important discovery” defeated the danger.

Since the case for Gallo’s HIV-AIDS hypothesis is invariably pressed with calls to the authority of its famous protagonist, in the absence of scientific proof in the sense that most curious folk understand, it’s as well that we know what kind of bloke we’re relying on.

With such scintillating credentials as Gallo’s, no wonder the astute German virologist Stefan Lanka – referring to HIV-AIDS, Luc Montagnier, and Gallo – talks of “a medical theory concocted by a French mediocrity who, right from the start, doubted the validity of a virus-only theory of AIDS causation and only last week unleashed a new wave of doubt; and an American scientific gangster who had committed so many crass, self-aggrandising blunders in the previous decade, that he could not really be relied upon to tell the time correctly”. Quite.

Anthony Brink is an advocate (barrister) in Pietermaritzburg South Africa.

Dr. Charles Socarides and his co-authors distort and exaggerate more
than 40 years of social science research about sexual orientation
(“Don’t Forsake Homosexuals Who Want Help” by Charles Socarides,
Benjamin Kaufman, Joseph Nicolosi, Jeffrey Satinover and Richard
Fitzgibbons, editorial page, Jan. 10). What they fail to tell the reader
— and this is backed up by reports conducted by members of the American
Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the
American Sociological Association — is that, at most, the small
percentage of people who claim to become heterosexuals have changed only
their behavior, not their identity, fantasies, or attractions; were most
likely bisexual to begin with; and exhibit these sexual behavioral
changes only for a short-term following therapy. Long-term behavioral
changes and changes in sexual orientation (that is, identity and
attraction) have not been established scientifically.
Furthermore, their preposterous ideas about “excessive clinging to
mothers,” defective masculinity, and feelings of guilt and shame have
not been substantiated ever since researchers began to look beyond
clinical samples.
The authors’ remark implying that if many men had sought reparative
treatment for their homosexuality they would not have died from AIDS
uncovers one of their vicious agendas. Their assumption — that if these
men were to have become heterosexual, they would not get AIDS — is a
sad comment on their lack of knowledge about HIV transmission. With the
majority of AIDS cases world-wide attributed to male-to-female sexual
transmission, why would they think lives would have been saved by
converting them behaviorally to heterosexual sex?
Peter M. Nardi
Professor of Sociology
Pitzer College
Claremont, Calif.
(Mr. Nardi is co-editor of “In Changing Times: Gay Men & Lesbians
Encounter HIV/AIDS,” University of Chicago Press.)
—
The American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric
Association long ago determined that homosexuality is not a mental
disorder. Research has failed to prove that one’s sexual orientation can
be changed. The “Homophobic Therapies: Documenting the Damage” project
is conducting research on behalf of the National Lesbian and Gay Health
Association with lesbians and gay men across the country who have gone
through conversion therapies or counseling. The project is being led by
Drs. Ariel Shidlo and Michael Schroeder, of New York’s Columbia Center
for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Mental Health and Montefiore Medical
Center respectfully. Their research has found that many individuals are
significantly scarred by such ineffective interventions.
Christopher J. Portelli
Executive Director
National Lesbian and Gay Health Association
Washington
(Also signing the letter is Jeffrey Akman, M. D., Department of
Psychiatry, George Washington University, and board president, NLGHA.)
—
Dr. Socarides and his colleagues are correct in saying there is
controversy about the biological basis of homosexuality. As authors of
the Scientific American articles they cite — one arguing for such a
biological basis, one skeptical of such claims — we obviously have
diverging positions on the issue. But we are united in our belief that
homosexuality, whatever its origins, is a healthy variation of human
sexuality that neither needs nor is amenable to medical treatment. On
the contrary, we lament the great suffering imposed on gay people over
the past hundred years by misguided and fruitless attempts to change
their sexual orientation.
Simon LeVay, Ph. D.
West Hollywood, Calif.
William Byne, M. D., Ph.D.
Department of Psychiatry
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
New York
—
It’s small wonder that many homosexuals seek counseling and help; in
fact, the miracle is that any one of us rise above societal
condemnations and become useful and productive citizens. What is
puzzling is how respected newspapers such as yours publish this garbage.
Most psychiatrists long ago abandoned the strong mother, weak father
theories and have instead tried to help gay people come to terms with
who they are.
Dan Byrne
The Colony, Texas
—
The authors say psychiatrists should suggest to unhappy gay men that
they consider therapy to become straight to reduce their risk of HIV
infection and AIDS. If one follows their line of reasoning it might also
be good to encourage unhappy straight women to become lesbians since
this would not only reduce their risk of becoming infected with HIV, but
would also totally eliminate their risk of unwanted pregnancies.
John F. Krowka
San Francisco
—
Dr. Socarides, et al., present some infrequently reported
information: Homosexuals, through therapy, may sometimes be able to
change to heterosexuality. This assertion is consistent with a survey I
conducted in 1992. The results were published in 1994 in the Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Association, 42:4:285 psychoanalysts from
all regions of the county reported their experiences analyzing 1,215
homosexual patients (824 male, 391 female). They reported that 84% of
patients received significant therapeutic benefit, and that 23% changed
to heterosexuality. The average length of analysis was 4.2 years.
Houston MacIntosh, M. D.
Washington
—
I would like to thank Dr. Charles Socarides, et al, for setting me
straight (so to speak). As a conservative, middle-aged gay man, I had
come to trust your editorial page for better analysis and more accurate
information than was available elsewhere. After reading this, that trust
is gone.
Perhaps the cruelest assertion by the authors is that it is despair
over not having a “normal life with a wife and children” that causes
some young gay men to feel their lives are of little value, leading them
to engage in unprotected sex and contract AIDS. If these young men feel
of little value, it is perhaps because they come of age in a society
that largely treats them as freakish, laughable, or worst of all,
nonexistent. It would be far better for us to raise our homosexual sons
with the same expectations that we have of our heterosexual sons: that
they live decent, productive and monogamous lives. That way, young gay
men would be freed from despair; and many heterosexual women would be
spared the pain of marriage to men who can never feel romantic love for
them.
Paul M. Nicholls
Atlanta
—
One needn’t look far to see the authors’ true colors revealed. There
is a clear message here: homosexuality is wrong. Heterosexuality is
“normal,” while homosexuality is a “disorder” or a “condition.” Those
men whose sexuality the doctors claim to have changed (a dubious claim,
at best) are “improved.” As an adult gay male (and one, incidentally,
who never “clung” to my mother in early childhood nor experienced any of
the other cited “causes” for homosexuality), I know that my sexuality is
normal, as is my 15-year monogamous relationship.
Nick Canavan
Sherman Oaks, Calif.
—
It doesn’t take a genius to understand that being gay isn’t a choice.
Why would millions choose a lifestyle for which they will be scorned? A
lifestyle in which committed couples are not entitled to the same legal
benefits as straight, married couples? A lifestyle for which they might
get beaten up or killed? A lifestyle that may very well isolate them
from friends and family? The only choice for a gay person is whether to
accept being gay and live a happy, productive life, or deny it and live
in a lonely closet, lying and hiding.
Charles Godwin
Davenport, Iowa
—
Apparently, lesbians are not homosexuals. Why leave us desperately
unhappy women out? We too want to experience shock treatment, drugs and
psychological treatment to cure us of our terrible affliction. Perhaps
voluntary euthanasia of us poor, depressed, unfortunates might be a
quicker, cleaner solution, or concentration camps with compulsory
laughing gas to cheer us up.
Bernie Sheehan
Sydney, Australia
—
The late Dr. Evelyn Hookers and others conducted research on gay men
in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. Their research convinced most psychiatrists
and psychologists that there was nothing abnormal about same sex
attraction and that there was nothing to treat. This research concluded
that the biggest problem gay men and lesbians faced was the social
prejudices fueled by hatred and misinformation.
Jeff Harris
Seattle
—
Dr. Socarides and his colleagues promise to help young homosexuals
who want to become heterosexuals, but their therapy administers the very
poison that causes despair in these men. Therapies that attempt to
“reverse” homosexuality have been proven ineffective, but they are not
harmless. These therapists promote self-hatred and a sense of
hopelessness that their clients have come to resolve. Research,
including my own, has shown that self-hatred, caused by the direction of
antihomosexual attitudes toward the self, causes psychological and
physical distress. From an early age, society teaches gay men and
lesbians that they have no hope for intimacy, love, and family.
Socarides and his colleagues have incorrectly concluded that young
homosexual men who seek their help experience an “unwanted sexual
attraction.”

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the
personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the
hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering
from the HIV/AIDS and others who are seeking to help them.]

….Is there significant difference in quality of the scientific research
concerning HIV and AIDS vs. that which concerns itself with Hepatitis C?

In other words, does the body of knowledge about Hepatitis C suffer, too,
from the ambiguities, contradictions, unfounded assumptions etc. – which
the HIV/AIDS body of knowledge suffers from?
— Omer

Yes, it seems to be so. Regarding this matter, I post here an answer by
Dr.Stefan Lanka (the virologist that affirms that HIV never was) to a
question about Hepatitis C (published on Continuum magazine vol.4 no.1).

The Hepatitis-C virus was never a reality or even an artefact, only an
invention. After the riddle around Hepatitis-B virus (HBV) – still “not
available for experiments” – was set so the general public had the
impression the Hep-B antibody test really detects antibodies formed in
reaction to infection with HBV (and the vaccination programme against it was
established), innovative scientists filled the gap in explaining hepatitis
without antibodies against hepatitis-A virus (HAV) and HBV as “a viral non-A
non-B Hepatitis”. As in the case of the illnesses grouped under the
artificial diagnosis “AIDS”, it didn’t occur to them to mention other well
known reasons for Hepatitis, e.g. alcool and bad diets.

It was then just a matter of years until some US scientists with corporate
backing came up with an antibody test, using only synthetic proteins
produced on the basis of some genetic sequences which were defined, in an ad
hoc act, as being part of the genetic sequence of “Hepatitis-C virus” (HCV).
These tests simply use some synthetic, non viral proteins, that were never
even said to be taken from a virus!

So, like all such tests, the HCV test can have no diagnostic value
whatsoever. Everybody who claims otherwise is acting irresponsably, and in
the case of medical doctors, have no real ethical values: the result of a
positive HCV test frightens people, who are then in danger of treatment with
problematic medications in high concentrations (interferons) and their
bodies may be damaged by psychosomatic reactions. Just ignore the result,
and avoid contact with any medical staff who believe in HCV and if possible
start legal action against them. This may be healing not only for you but
for others too. So, look out for a young responsible scientist to help you.
The older ones have failed badly by challenging nothing>>

[Please note: This article was published in the New York Native (9
May 1988), and was reprinted as Chapter XII of the book, POISON BY
PRESCRIPTION: THE AZT STORY (ny 1990). I hereby give permission to
print out this document and to photocopy it. However, it may not
be published commercially without my permission. — John Lauritsen,
Box 1902, Provincetown, MA 02657-0245. E-mail: jlaurits@capecod.net]

A “Scientific Forum on the Etiology of AIDS”, sponsored by
the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), was held on
April 9, 1988 at the George Washington University in Washington,
D.C. In the words of the AmFAR “fact sheet”, the Forum was
“convened to critically examine the evidence that human
immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or other agents give rise to
the disease complex known as AIDS. Data from laboratory,
clinical, and epidemiological research will be presented and
evaluated. The forum seeks no consensus, instead it is
designed to permit discussion among experts on the
conclusions the facts permit.”

As one of the 17 journalists who attended, I looked forward
to the forum as the first opportunity for an open discussion of
the pros and cons of the hypothesis that HIV is the cause of
AIDS. Ever since Secretary Heckler announced in 1984 that the
cause of AIDS had been discovered, HIV has been accepted as the
cause despite the lack of proof that it is. The Public Health
Service and the rest of the medical establishment have acquiesced
in a “Proof by Proclamation”. The forum offered the first
opportunity for Peter Duesberg, Professor of Molecular Biology at
the University of California at Berkeley, to confront members of
the “AIDS establishment” over their HIV hypothesis. Over a year
ago Duesberg provided a comprehensive and cogently argued
refutation of the HIV hypothesis, to which the “AIDS
establishment” has intransigently refused to reply (New York
Native 220).

Despite these praiseworthy intentions, the forum appears to
have had a hidden agenda: to discredit Duesberg. Even Michael
Specter, a reporter who caters to the “AIDS establishment” and is
bitterly opposed to Duesberg, admitted that the April 9 meeting
“was billed as a scientific forum on the cause of AIDS but was
really an attempt to put Duesberg’s theories to rest.”
The forum represented several steps forward, and several
backward. At least the ice has been broken, and the causes of
AIDS are now an acceptable topic for public discussion. While no
blows were struck, some of the HIV protagonists fell below the
standards of civility that are expected in scholarly debate.
Nothing particularly new was said, and there was little of the
give and take that characterize genuine scientific dialogue. At
the same time, the positions of both sides have become more
sharply defined; it is now clear what directions future debate
should take.

On the whole, I regard the forum as a victory for Duesberg.
The forum was a well-orchestrated media event, heavily stacked
against him, and he took a lot of abuse. Nevertheless, he stood
by his guns; he did not recant (as he apparently was expected
to); and to the more discerning participants, he exposed the
bankruptcy of the arguments currently advanced in favor of the
HIV hypothesis. At all times Duesberg retained good manners and
a sense of humor, in the face of invective, insults, and clowning
from his opponents.

Before going into what each of the panelists said, I’d like
to discuss a couple of general issues which came to the fore:
Koch’s Postulates and the nature of scientific evidence.

Koch’s Postulates

The forum was haunted by the specter of Robert Koch, and the
postulates that he formulated for “establishing the specificity
of a pathogenic micro-organism”. For a century, medical science
has used Koch’s postulates as the standards for proving that a
particular micro-organism causes a particular disease. The first
Postulate requires that the microbe be found in all cases of the
disease; the second, that the microbe, having been grown in pure
culture, be injected into susceptible animals with the result
that the same disease is produced; and the third, that the
microbial agent create the disease upon transfer from animals
made ill by inoculation.

Duesberg has taken the position that Koch’s first Postulate
should be amended in a conservative direction, so that the
microbe must not only be present in all cases, but must also be
biochemically active to a clinically relevant degree. His
rationale is that present-day technology makes it possible to see
viruses that would have remained unknown and undetectable only
ten years ago. It is now possible to identify a virus that is
present in only one in 100,000 T-cells. So it is not enough to
detect a microbe; it must be proven that the microbe is doing
something harmful, and to a sufficient degree, that illness
results. Duesberg has also commented, that if Koch’s first
Postulate is not satisfied, there is no need to bother about the
remaining postulates.

The HIV advocates, on the other hand, now wish to revise
Koch’s in a more permissive direction: it would no longer be
necessary to find the microbe in all cases of the disease. Mere
correlations between microbial antibodies and the progression of
the disease would be sufficient. HIV could be proved
“epidemiologically” to be the cause of AIDS.

Actually, the HIV advocates talked out of both sides of
their mouths with regard to Koch’s postulates. On the one hand,
they disparaged them as in need of “modification” (read:
abandonment); on the other hand, they were doing their best to
come up with data that would satisfy at least the first
postulate, which is troublesome because it amounts to good common
sense.

Public vs. Private Facts

Duesberg has based his critique of the HIV hypothesis on a
thorough review of the published literature on AIDS. In the
course of the debate, it appeared that the HIV advocates are
trying to shore up their arguments by revising the facts,
particularly with regard to the crucial questions of whether or
not HIV is ever biochemically active in people with AIDS (PWAs),
and whether or not HIV can be detected in all PWAs.
Several times Duesberg was accused by Anthony Fauci and
William Haseltine of having based his arguments on research that
was “out of date”. Duesberg replied that some of the key figures
he cited had been used recently by members of the AIDS
establishment, and that he looked forward to reading reports of
any new data.

A fundamental difference in philosophy is involved here, one
which needs to be articulated. On several occasions Duesberg and
Harry Rubin, Duesberg’s colleague at Berkeley, asked Fauci or
Haseltine for references to back up assertions they had made, and
they were rudely rebuffed. Both Duesberg and Rubin belong to the
old school, according to which facts are not entirely “real”
until they have been published. Scientists are expected to make
their data available, together with a detailed description of
methodology, so that other scientists, working independently,
could attempt to replicate the experiments and verify the
results. Science is thus a public activity, where scientists
check out each other’s work in a mutual endeavor to establish the
truth.

Unfortunately, government scientists and others in the AIDS
establishment have sometimes been motivated by considerations
other than the truth. In the interests of profit, prestige, and
public relations, they have resorted to secrecy and deception. A
case in point is the well-documented episode in which Robert
Gallo attempted to steal credit from the French for the discovery
of the “AIDS virus”.

The difference in philosophy needs to be emphasized.
Duesberg, basing his arguments on public facts, was countered by
Fauci and Haseltine, who referred to their own private facts.
Now, it is possible that Duesberg’s public facts may be wrong,
and that Haseltine’s and Fauci’s private facts may be correct.
But even if that were the case, it would be a grave injustice to
Duesberg to criticize him for having used public information.
When Duesberg insists upon references, he is not quibbling; he is
acting in the best tradition of science.

Harold Ginsberg

The panel was moderated by Harold Ginsberg, Professor of
Medicine and Microbiology at Columbia University. He began by
saying that recording of the forum would not be permitted,
although there would be an official transcript of the
proceedings, and that the purpose of the forum was to “discuss in
an informal and friendly manner the etiology of AIDS.” He then
went into a presentation of his own. After conceding that “the
pathogenesis of HIV is still pretty much a black box”, he
discussed the characteristics of several viral diseases,
including influenza, poliomyelitis, measles, herpes simplex, and
hepatitis B. He emphasized that neutralizing antibodies could be
present when disease occurs, and did not necessarily prevent
viruses from being present in the blood.

Ginsberg’s comments served to set the stage against Duesberg
by toppling a straw dummy representing selective statements, torn
out of context, which Duesberg had made on antibodies. It became
obvious that the forum would not favor free and impartial
discussion of the issues — an impartial discussion, after all,
requires an impartial moderator. It was also obvious that the
HIV protagonists would employ information overload as a
propaganda technique. While Ginsberg’s comments were true
enough, so far as they went, they were mostly irrelevant to the
central issues of the debate. Nevertheless, they conveyed the
impression that a vast body of knowledge argued against
Duesberg’s critique of the HIV hypothesis. Novice reporters,
straining to take in all of Ginsberg’s information (without the
aid of tape recorders), ended up with little space in their heads
for the relevant issues.

Marcel Beluda

The next speaker was Marcel Beluda, Professor of Pathology
at the University of California at Los Angeles. His presentation
dealt with the complex structure and reproduction cycles of
retroviruses, and what rules a retrovirus would have to follow in
order to cause disease. He said that, with regard to Koch’s
first Postulate, retroviral DNA should be present in 100% of the
cases, and that it was a serious weakness in identifying HIV as
the etiological agent that this requirement could not be
satisfied.

Beluda’s presentation was complex and highly nuanced, and he
ran out of time. Nevertheless, his concluding statement came out
clear and strong: “We must resolve the ‘black box’ HIV biological
phenomenon.”

Harry Rubin

Harry Rubin, Professor of Molecular Biology at the
University of California at Berkeley, was one of the pioneers in
the field of retrovirology. Twenty years ago Rubin was king of
the field; he trained many of the scientists who are today the
world’s leading retrovirologists.

Rather than discussing the intricacies of molecular biology,
Rubin went instead to the heart of the matter: the conceptual
problems of AIDS. Rubin said that he was disturbed by the
simplicity of the causal explanation that had been put forward.
An enormous complexity of disease states constitute the AIDS
Syndrome; no fewer than 20 different diseases are classified as
“AIDS”. Cartesian reductionism — the notion that complex
phenomena can be reduced to a single cause — didn’t make much
sense in this context. The simplistic notion of a single disease
entity caused by a single virus ignored the role played by the
condition of the host — the complex, life-long interaction
between the host, the environment, and microbes.

For Rubin a red flag went up when he learned that Burkitt’s
lymphoma was classified along with the many other manifestations
of AIDS. He recalled that for many years attempts had been made
to explain Burkitt’s lymphoma and other cancers in terms of
viruses, with such candidates as Epstein-Barr virus proposed.
The generally favored explanation came to be chromosomal
abnormalities. And now, apparently, “HIV infection” is supposed
to be a cause of some cancers.

Rubin said that the simplistic HIV causal explanation raised
a lot of questions, and recalled a theory that was popular 20
years ago to explain the origin of cancer. The “immune
surveillance theory” held that the body somehow lost its immune
capacity and, in consequence, its ability to hold down cancers.
The theory is no longer talked about owing to experiments on
athymic mice, known as “nude mice”. (Lacking thymus glands, nude
mice cannot manufacture T-cells, and therefore lack a cellular
immune system.) What dissolved the “immune surveillance theory”
was the discovery that nude mice, while susceptible to many
different diseases, had no higher incidences of any cancer than
did mice with normal immune systems. So, Rubin asked, how can we
talk about “immune deficiency” as being responsible for the
cancers that are considered to be a part of the syndrome known as
“AIDS”?

Rubin concluded by saying that he found any single cause of
the enormous complex of diseases to be seriously inadequate.
While he was not willing categorically to rule out the
possibility that HIV might play some role in some cases, he was
“not ready blandly to accept it as the single cause of all of the
disease complex.” Rubin posed the question, to what extent is
the virus itself an opportunistic infection? He found it
irresponsible to focus exclusive attention on the putative viral
cause while failing to address the associated practices of high
risk groups (heavy use of recreational drugs, overuse of
antibiotics, promiscuous sexual behavior) which are themselves
known to compromise the immune system.

In the question period following Rubin’s presentation,
William Haseltine bluntly challenged Rubin on the issue of high-
risk behavior, and asserted that the best correlation with AIDS
is “evidence of viral infection”, and that there were many
instances of AIDS in persons with no known risk factors. Rubin
replied that the serological evidence seemed to argue against
HIV, since in many PWAs neither antibodies nor virus could be
detected.

Beluda then intervened, apparently annoyed by Haseltine’s
belligerence, to state that sometimes even a single exception is
sufficient to disprove a theory. HIV antibodies are reportedly
found in 90% of PWAs, but what about the other 10%? “This is the
crux of the matter”, Beluda said, “the virus cannot be found in
all cases of AIDS.”

Fauci responded to Beluda by saying that a “good lab” was
able to isolate the virus in 90-100% of the cases, that there was
“no question about it”. Fauci did not provide a reference to
published data, nor did he indicate what the “good labs” were, or
how exactly they differed from the not-so-good labs.

Peter Duesberg

(Since Duesberg’s presentation covered a lot of ground, I’ll
try to summarize just the main points here. To understand the
full scope of his arguments, the articles listed below under
“References” should be consulted.)

Basically Duesberg argued that HIV does not have the
physical properties to cause disease, let alone the devastating
pathology associated with AIDS. The HIV hypothesis is fraught
with contradictions (or “paradoxes”); it violates the rules that
all other microbes follow when they cause disease; indeed, the
hypothesis sometimes violates the principle of causality itself.
Duesberg began by attacking the prevailing hypothesis: that
HIV kills T-cells after a bizarre latent period of 5-8 years.

This cannot be true, he said, because retroviruses do not kill
cells — in fact, retroviruses make cells grow faster. The “AIDS
virus” hypothesis is now the basis for over $1 billion research
efforts annually, making it the most expensive virus in history.
The HIV hypothesis is the basis for the “AIDS test”, which is in
fact only a test for HIV antibodies. Antibodies, which for 200
years have been interpreted as good news, are now interpreted as
a prognosis for death. Positive results on the antibody test
have resulted in suicides and broken marriages; they would be the
basis for denying residence in China. The presence of HIV
antibodies is now being used to justify treatment with AZT, which
has one known effect: to stop DNA synthesis; the obligatory
consequence of incorporating AZT into a human cell is either a
dead or a mutated cell.

The “AIDS virus” hypothesis is based only on correlation —
between HIV antibodies and AIDS — a correlation in the
neighborhood of 80-90% (“They never say 100%”). And even if the
correlation were 100%, this would not prove causality. Further,
antibodies are not the same as the virus itself, which is so
extremely difficult to detect that only the most expensive
laboratories in the country are capable of doing so, and even
then, only in about half of the cases of AIDS.

All known viruses (polio, hepatitis, et al.) are
biochemically active when they cause disease. They have to kill
or intoxicate more cells than the host can regenerate.
Paradoxically: HIV is inactive and latent, even in patients who
are dying from AIDS. A virus cannot cause harm without doing
something. Although viruses can go through periods of latency,
neither herpes nor any other virus is inactive at the time that
it causes disease. HIV actively infects fewer than one in 10,000
T-cells, even in fatal cases of AIDS. This is trivial, the
equivalent of losing one drop of blood every day.

Viruses cause disease before, not after antiviral immunity.
This is why vaccination works. Paradoxically: HIV is said to
cause AIDS only after a peculiar latent period of 5 to 8 years.
HIV is a retrovirus, and retroviruses do not kill cells. On
the contrary, they depend on living cells to reproduce. This is
why retroviruses were the most plausible viral carcinogens in
President Nixon’s “War on Cancer”. Paradoxically: the retrovirus
called HIV is said to cause AIDS by killing T-cells. In fact,
Robert Gallo and others have observed that T-cells in culture
produce much more virus than is ever produced in AIDS patients,
yet survive indefinitely, developing into immortal lines.
No known virus discriminates between men and women, or
between heterosexuals and homosexuals. Paradoxically: even eight
years into the epidemic, AIDS shows an absolute preference for
men (92%).

The transfusion cases have been used as an argument for the
HIV hypothesis, yet transfusions do not discriminate between HIV
and all other microbes, toxins, etc. that are in the blood. That
the transfusion argument is not strong, but tenuous, is shown by
the control group of 14,000 hemophiliacs in the United States who
are antibody positive, yet only 300 (2%) of whom have developed
any of the many symptoms of AIDS. The low incidence is even more
striking in light of the fact that hemophiliacs are a
congenitally sickly population; only a few years ago, their
average life expectancy was 11 years. Furthermore, it is now
three years since the HIV antibody test came into use to screen
blood. We should have seen at least a levelling off of the
“transfusion cases”, but contrary to expectations, they have just
doubled.

According to basic logic, a virus or other pathogen would at
least have to be present when it causes disease. This is Koch’s
first postulate for identifying a causative pathogen, which
states that the presumed causative agent must be present in all
cases of the disease. However, HIV can only be isolated in 50%
of AIDS cases. Although there are unpublished observations that
the figure can be pushed up to 100%, this is not consistent with
the fact that pro-viral DNA cannot be detected in a substantial
proportion of AIDS cases. Gallo could only detect pro-viral DNA
in 15% of AIDS cases. A recent article in Science Magazine
reported being unable to detect pro-viral DNA in a significant
number of AIDS cases, even using the most sensitive techniques.
Duesberg posed the question, why is the “AIDS virus”
hypothesis so popular, in the face of so many paradoxes? He
suggested that this was due to two problems in the field:
1. Progress in biological thought has not kept up with the
rapid progress in technology. Only ten years ago, scientists
would never have detected a latent virus that is only active in
one out of every 100,000 T-cells. With their limited tools, Koch
or Pasteur or Enders or Sabin were forced to look for microbes at
clinically relevant titers. Indeed, Koch’s first postulate needs
to be amended now, in light of the technology of the present, to
state that pathogens must not only be detectable, by the most
sensitive techniques available, but must also be biochemically
active in more cells than the host can spare or regenerate.
2. AIDS is a syndrome, not a single infectious disease. The
spectrum of diseases is truly impressive… yet such things as
lymphoma and Kaposi’s sarcoma cannot be attributed to immune
deficiency, as is shown by the example of the nude mice. Nor
does immune deficiency explain dementia.
In short, the one-virus, one-disease concept is hard to
reconcile with the AIDS situation, although people would like to
see it that way. AIDS propaganda has transformed a latent, non-
cytocidal retrovirus, a “Sleeping Beauty”, into a vicious killer
virus. AIDS propaganda has reduced a complex syndrome to a
single disease entity with a single cause. What we need to do is
look at “risk behavior”, which may hold the keys to the many
diseases of AIDS.

Anthony Fauci

Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases, has become the most publicly prominent
member of the “AIDS establishment”, often quoted in the press and
featured on television shows. His presentation, while aspiring
to be a point-by-point rebuttal to Duesberg, consisted mainly of
disconnected assertions, delivered in a tone of petulant
indignation.

Epidemiological studies conducted in San Francisco and
unpublished laboratory reports seemed to be the basis of most of
his statements. So far as I could tell, he understood virtually
none of Duesberg’s arguments; whatever else he may be, Fauci is
not a philosopher.

It is not true, Fauci said, that HIV is inactive; sometimes
there are “bursts of activity”. According to Fauci, it is false
to say that nothing is happening: HIV is “insidiously destroying
the immune system” in asymptomatic but infected people.
Fauci claimed that the AIDS virus is unique in that its
major target is the immune system itself. The disease is not HIV
infection; “it is the opportunistic infections and neoplasms that
kill the individual.” Auto-immune phenomena, etc. can also be
taken into account, in addition to the direct cytocidal effect,
which is clearly demonstrated in vitro. The macrophages can
serve as a reservoir, where the virus can hide out without being
detected by the immune system.

Fauci accused Duesberg of having said if you’re infected
this means, “hurrah, your body has won!” According to Fauci,
this flies negatively in the face of the data [based on an
unpublished San Francisco study] that within five years, 90% of
seropositive individuals will have deleterious effects on their
immune system.

Fauci countered Duesberg’s point on “discrimination” —
that the virus seems to attack mostly homosexual men — by saying
that the point was the mechanism of transmission. Risk behavior
simply meant coming into contact with the virus. He then asked a
series of abusively rhetorical questions.
“What kind of risk behavior”, he demanded, “does the infant
born of an infected mother have?”
“And what about the 50-year-old woman who received a blood
transfusion from an infected donor?”
(The answer to the first question is: 1) in the decade of
the AIDS epidemic, there have been only a few hundred reported
cases of infants with AIDS, 2) infants are not yet
immunocompetent, and 3) virtually all infants with AIDS were born
to mothers who were drug abusers — as everyone ought to know,
drugs cause birth defects. The answer to the second question is
that a 50-year old woman who requires a blood transfusion is
already at risk, and that blood transfusions involve massive
exposure to microbes, human cells, and toxins of all kinds.)
Fauci addressed the question of Koch’s first postulate by
asserting that “good labs” could find the virus in 90-95% of the
cases — that it was too much to expect 100%, because any
technique has a limitation. He concluded by saying, “The data
strongly, if not overwhelming, indicates [sic] that HIV is the
cause of AIDS.” (This is a step backward — only a few weeks
ago, Fauci found the evidence “overwhelming”.)

In the question period, Beluda asked if the evidence were
sufficient that HIV is necessary for the development of AIDS.
Fauci replied that he hoped the epidemiologists would answer that
question.

William Haseltine

William Haseltine, Chief of the Laboratory of Biochemical
Pharmacology at the Dana Farber Cancer Center of Harvard Medical
School, appeared to be an angry man. His presentation was
devoted largely to personal attacks on Duesberg, in a manner
which two of my colleagues described as “brutal” and “vicious”.
Haseltine’s anger can probably be attributed to Celia Farber’s
interview with Duesberg in Spin Magazine (January 1988), in which
Duesberg stated:

William Haseltine and Max Essex, who are two of the top
five AIDS researchers in the country, have millions in
stocks in a company they founded that has developed and will
sell AIDS kits that test for HIV. How could they be
objective?

When Celia Farber contacted Haseltine, he confirmed his and
Essex’s business arrangement with Cambridge Bio-Science, a
company that sells HIV testing kits. Said Haseltine: “I deeply
resent the implication that my business investments have affected
my work.”

Haseltine accused Duesberg of “serious confusion and
misrepresentation of fact”. He said that when rational arguments
don’t hold up, Duesberg “has resorted to personal attack; he has
impugned the motivations of individuals and institutions.”
Haseltine asserted that “HIV is demonstrably cytopathic”,
though he didn’t say how.

He quoted Duesberg as having said that antibodies were “good
news”. Not so, said Haseltine, to be antibody positive is very
bad news for the health of the individual.

Haseltine said it was not true that there was no detectable
viremia in AIDS patients, and said he would show a slide “with
the current perception with regard to viremia…during the later
course of infection, one sees rising antigenemia in most persons
infected.”

He attacked Duesberg’s “paradox”, that the AIDS virus seemed
to be able to discriminate between boys and girls, by saying that
this was not true outside the U.S. — in Africa, about equal
numbers of men and women develop AIDS. (He seemed oblivious to
the paradox that a microbe should be able to discriminate in one
country, but not in another.)

According to Haseltine, Rubin and Duesberg were confused
about nude mice, which in certain classes were capable of
“mounting a vigorous immune response”.

The most dramatic moment in the forum came when Haseltine
began showing his slides.

Haseltine’s Fake Slide

In presenting his first slide, Haseltine said, “This gives
us a summary of the virology. Dr. Duesberg asserts that during
the later phases of the disease one does not see free virus in
circulation. That is not generally reflected in the patients.
During the latter phase of the disease, the black line represents
either virus titer or viral antigens directly detectable in the
circulation. It rises later in the disease. That rise is
concomitant with the period when T-cells fall. So it is not the
case, the central assertion he has made in his arguments, that
one does not have viremia.”

At this point Duesberg asked, “Why are there no units on
that slide?”

“Don’t interrupt me”, responded Haseltine, “I didn’t
interrupt you.”

“I merely asked why the slide has no units on it”, replied
Duesberg.

Haseltine angrily refused to answer the question, and the
chairman intervened, saying that questions would have to wait
until the presentation was finished.
Perhaps Duesberg ought to have waited, but one can
understand his impatience. Witnessing a fast-flowing stream of
propaganda, he spotted something that was obviously wrong, and
wanted to confront it before the moment was lost. That his
suspicions were more than justified became clear later.
In the question period following Haseltine’s presentation,
Harry Rubin asked Haseltine if he could provide a reference for
his statement that nude mice were capable of mounting a vigorous
immune response. Haseltine said that there was a large
literature on nude mice: “If you haven’t read it, how can I
discuss it with you?”. Rubin gently replied that perhaps he had
read it, but that he had only asked for a reference.
Duesberg then requested that the slide be shown on the
screen again, and asked if it were an accident that the slide had
no units on it.

[A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE SLIDE APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK NATIVE
ARTICLE. IT SHOWS A GRAPH ENTITLED “AIDS VIRUS AND ANTIBODY”.
THE TWO VERTICAL AXES ARE LABELLED “VIRUS TITER” AND “AB TITER”,
BUT HAVE NO UNITS OF ANY KIND. THE HORIZONTAL AXIS HAS
CHRONOLOGICAL NOTATIONS WHICH ARE GIBBERISH: “3-6 WEEKS”, “2-10
YRS”, AND “1.5-2 YRS”.]

Haseltine was unable to answer the question himself, and
asked Dr. Robert Redfield of the Walter Reed Army Research
Institute, sitting in the audience, to explain how the slide was
prepared. Redfield said something to the effect that “different
measurements were used”, a grossly inadequate explanation. When
Duesberg persisted, Haseltine became truculent, and said that
Duesberg should read the literature, because there were different
measures that could be used. With no satisfactory answer
forthcoming, the chairman moved on.

The truth about the Slide Without Units came out in the
evening, at a party at the home of Dr. Harris Coulter (author of
“AIDS and Syphilis: The Hidden Link”). In a relaxed and convivial
mood, Redfield admitted, in the presence of Duesberg, Rubin,
myself, and several other witnesses, that the graph had been
prepared to illustrate a theoretical possibility. It had no
units on it for the simple reason that it was not based on any
data at all. In other words, the slide was a fake.

It is difficult to think of an innocent explanation for
Haseltine’s behavior. If he didn’t know what the slide meant, or
whether or not it was real, then he shouldn’t have used it.
Haseltine presented the slide as though it represented scientific
findings, whereas it really represented speculation. It is not
unfair to call this kind of misrepresentation, fraud. Nor is it
making too much out of one fake slide. If someone will cheat in
little things, he will cheat in big things as well. In my book,
Haseltine has forfeited his claim to scientific credibility.

Warren Winkelstein

Warren Winkelstein, Professor of Biomedical and
Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health,
University of California at Berkeley, gave a talk entitled
“Epidemiological Observations on the Causal Nature of the
Association Between Infection by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus
and the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome”. He was the only
panelist to provide printed copies of his talk, something much
appreciated by us journalists.

Briefly, the point of Winkelstein’s presentation is that
Koch’s postulates should be superseded by new standards for
establishing the causal relationship between microbes and
disease, and that these standards should be based upon
“epidemiology”, or, as it were, correlations of various kinds.
Winkelstein and colleagues in San Francisco, under the
auspices of Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, studied a sample of single men, 25-54 years of age,
over a period of three and a half years. Data were collected on
HIV antibody status over time, on progression to AIDS, and on
various other clinical parameters.

They found that none of the heterosexual males and none of
the gay men who remained seronegative developed AIDS, whereas 13%
of the men who were seropositive upon entry into the study, and
8% of those who became positive during the course of the study
developed AIDS. Further, they found that a progressive decline
in T-4 cells occurred among those who were seropositive.
They concluded that epidemiological data from their study,
together with data from a related San Francisco study (conducted
among a cohort of gay men recruited from VD clinics in 1978 for a
hepatitis B study), supported “the hypothesis of a causal
association between HIV infection and AIDS.”

All in all, a grim scenario, according to which testing
positive for HIV antibodies would truly be a “prognosis for
death”. I am skeptical, but as a survey research professional I
reserve the right to withhold judgment until I have seen full
reports on both San Francisco studies. At minimum such reports
would have to include full descriptions of methodology; all
questionnaires, recording forms, and field materials; sampling
procedures; and computer tabulations.

At any rate, I do not accept the proposition that Koch’s
postulates should be abandoned in favor of epidemiological
correlations. This would be a step backward, a step away from
scientific rigor, a stop towards impressionism and confusion.

Murray Gardner

Murray Gardner, Chairman of the Department of Pathology,
University of California at Davis, spoke about lentiviruses and
animals. The man is apparently a failed stand-up comedian.
During his presentation he danced back and forth behind the
table, gesturing wildly, urging the audience to laugh along with
him at the absurdity of doubting, even for a moment, that HIV was
the cause of AIDS. We were told that the animals had “little
understanding of co-factors”, that their diseases had “nothing to
do with lifestyle”, and so on.

Gardner had begun his clown act even earlier, making faces
during Rubin’s presentation. Virtually nothing Gardner said was
relevant, and little was memorable, except perhaps the mistakes.
A slide of his referred to the “pathogenicity of new HIV strains,
e.g., HIV-2”. This is wrong: HIV-1 and HIV-2 are not different
strains of each other; they are completely different viruses;
they differ in genetic structure by up to 60%; they do not have a
closely-related common ancestor.

(Based on these facts, Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, an independent
AIDS researcher in New York City, has formulated an “evolutionary
argument” against the HIV hypothesis, which runs roughly as
follows: There is no longer just one “AIDS virus”; there are
several, perhaps as many as four or five at last count. It is
now claimed that both HIV-1 and HIV-2 are capable of causing
AIDS, a disease which allegedly appeared in the world for the
first time only a few years ago. However, viruses are products
of evolution, and very ancient — there is no such thing as a
“new” virus. The proposition that, within the space of a few
years, two different viruses, each capable of causing the same
new disease, should have come into being, or should have gone
from an animal reservoir to susceptible human populations, is
seyond the bounds of probability.)

Gardner concluded his presentation by winking at the
audience. It reminded me of one critic’s comment on a cheaply
made horror movie — that the zombies were less frightening than
the attempts at humor.

Roger Detels

Roger Detels, Professor of Public Health, University of
California at Los Angeles, began his talk by saying that it was
good to continue questioning judgments. In context, this
amounted to an apology to Duesberg and Rubin for the rudeness
with which they had been treated. It was a gracious gesture on
his part.

Detels discussed the San Francisco “Multi-Center AIDS Cohort
Study”, in which an annual “attack rate” of 5% was found among
the seropositive gay men studied. That is, each year 5% of the
seropositives came down with AIDS. (Harry Rubin was to point out
later, that if 1-3 million Americans are seropositive, according
to CDC estimates, and if the annual attack rate is 5%, simple
arithmetic indicates that every year 50,000 to 150,000 people
ought to develop AIDS.)

During the question period, pathogenesis was mentioned
again, and Haseltine entered the fray, insisting that there were
plenty of mechanisms that could explain pathogenesis, and that it
was not necessary to discuss it.

Questions From The Audience

The first audience participant was Harvey Bialy, Research
Editor of “Biotechnology”. His remarks were rather technical, and
can be found in more detail in an editorial in the February issue
of “Biotechnology”. The gist is that several recent articles have
cited antigenemia findings to suggest that HIV may, after all, be
active during the fatal, late stages of AIDS. However, the
papers contain serious mathematical and other discrepancies.
Bialy maintained that it was the responsibility of scientists, as
well as journalists, to look at data critically and ask the hard
questions.

The second speaker from the audience was Coulter, who asked
whether findings from the San Francisco City Clinic study, based
on a sample of gay men who had hepatitis B, and who were highly
promiscuous and heavily into recreational drugs, could be
extrapolated to all of the people in the U.S. who were
seropositive. For some reason, the epidemiologists were either
unable or unwilling to answer his question. Coulter persisted,
asking the question in several different ways, each of which was
perfectly clear. But the “AIDS experts” could not respond. This
was truly amazing, for the question was one of the most basic in
all of statistics. It is the question of how representative a
sample is of a particular universe or population — of whether
one can project findings from the sample to the target universe.

Next, Dr. Nathaniel Lehrman, an independent researcher from
Long Island, spoke, emphasizing the need to re-examine the
etiology of AIDS, not only because of the questions raised by
Duesberg and others, but because its epidemiology is far more
consistent with a toxic illness than with an infectious one. How
could AIDS be only an infection, and spreading so rapidly, when,
according to Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, M.D., not one of
750 accidental inoculees with the blood or body fluids of known
AIDS patients developed the disease, and only three then
developed antibodies to HIV?

Chemical causes of immune deficiency, stated Lehrman, have
long been known, and one group of chemicals, known to produce
immune suppression, may be a cause of AIDS in the homosexual
community: inhaled nitrites, or “poppers”. And although poppers
are banned by law in New York State, they are as freely available
on New York streets as any other illegal drug. Could other
chemicals also be involved in producing immune suppression and
AIDS? Lehrman concluded by saying that the possibility that
chemical toxicity plays a significant causal role in AIDS ought
to be investigated, and that therefore changes, or at least
additional methods in diagnosing, treating and researching the
syndrome should be adopted. One such step would be
spectrophotometric and similar investigation of AIDS patients for
unusual, immune-suppressive substances within their bodies.
I spoke next, and said it was high time that those who
advanced the hypothesis that HIV was the cause of AIDS should
publish a monograph in an appropriate journal, which would bring
together all the evidence supporting their hypothesis, which
would take into account the critiques made by Duesberg and
others, and which would contain proper references for all
assertions made. Then I said that the epidemiological research
on AIDS had been very poor, completely unacceptable by the
standards of professional survey research. Ever since 1984,
Public Health Service surveys have concentrated only on such
things as “modes of transmission”, or “risk factors for
seroconversion”, as a result of which we know almost nothing
about the characteristics of PWAs. We have no idea what the IV
drug users with AIDS are like, other than the “risk group” label
that has been slapped on them. Finally, I said it was
disgraceful that AZT was still being marketed, a poisonous drug
without a single scientifically-established benefit. When would
the AIDS establishment admit that the AZT trials, on which
approval of the drug was based, were fraudulent?
Finally, Specter, the reporter from the Washington Post,
demanded that Duesberg give him a yes or no answer to the
question, “Do you still maintain that someone should be overjoyed
to find out he is [HIV-antibody] positive?” Duesberg paused, and
way one does when confronted with an obstreperous barbarian,
Specter started yelling, “Answer the question! Yes or No? Why
won’t you answer the question?” When he finally got a chance,
Duesberg replied that he would answer the question, but in his
own words, not Specter’s. Duesberg repeated his position, but
the nuances of his answer were not appreciated by Specter.

Summing Up

For the debate on the cause or causes of AIDS to move
forward, a number of questions of fact must be resolved: Does HIV
kill cells in vivo (in living organisms)? If so, how?
References? Is HIV really “more complex in its genetic makeup
than any other known retrovirus” (as asserted in AmFAR’s “Review
of Operations: 1985-1986”)? References? From what percentage of
PWAs can HIV be isolated? From what percentage of PWAs can pro-
viral DNA be detected? References? What is the definition of a
“good lab”? References? Is viremia found in PWAs? If so, what
virus titers are obtained, when, how, etc.? References? Are
there (as asserted by Gallo et al.) both pathogenic and non-
pathogenic strains of HIV? If so, how do they differ?
References? Can “nude mice” really mount a vigorous immune
response (as asserted by Haseltine)? Is a full report available
on the epidemiological research conducted in San Francisco?

The forum exposed the bankruptcy of the arguments used by
the HIV advocates. Only a few weeks ago they were trotting out
at least half a dozen speculative mechanisms to explain how HIV
might cause AIDS; during the forum, such speculations were
abandoned, and the official line was, “We don’t need to explain
pathogenesis.” The “AIDS virus” crowd cannot agree on even the
most crucial questions of fact, as indicated above. At one
moment HIV is ferociously killing T-cells; the next moment, “AIDS
experts” are desperately scrounging around for “indirect
mechanisms”. “Epidemiology” has been called in as a last ditch
effort to rescue the HIV hypothesis, and yet the epidemiology
conducted by the AIDS establishment to date has been quite bad,
totally unacceptable by the standards of professional survey
research. While the San Francisco studies may “strongly support”
the HIV hypothesis, they could not prove it, even if the data
were correct (and this cannot be determined until a proper report
is issued), because there remain alternative explanations to
account for the correlation between HIV antibodies and AIDS —
namely, that HIV is itself an opportunistic infection in the AID
Syndrome, that HIV is a marker for AIDS.

I am more sure than ever that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.
If the HIV advocates were sure of their hypothesis, they would
want to enlighten us; they would want to publish their arguments
in a proper scientific journal, complete with references. They
would not need to resort to stonewalling, deception, and personal
abuse.

William E. Simon is best known for making a fortune in leveraged
buyouts after a star turn as an outspoken, conservative Treasury
secretary in the 1970s. So what’s he doing in the dupe’s role in two
recent Ponzi schemes?
The hard-charging financier is also notorious for his hubris,
harshness and impatience. So what’s he doing quietly offering Communion
to cancer and AIDS patients in New York or assisting sick pilgrims at
Lourdes?
After more than two decades in the public eye, the 68-year-old Mr.
Simon still holds substantial surprises. For one thing, he is coming
into focus as a less savvy investor than his reputation suggests. Yet he
is also emerging as less cold-hearted and more reflective than he has
appeared to many of his critics. And though he has been out of politics
for many years, he clearly hasn’t lost his taste for it, a fact that may
yield one more surprise — in 1996.
Mr. Simon’s entanglement in the recent scam involving the Foundation
for New Era Philanthropy appears to reflect both his growing charitable
inclinations and his unexpected financial sloppiness. Last year, New
Era’s mastermind, John G. Bennett, told Mr. Simon that New Era had a
stable of anonymous donors who would match his contributions to
charities — and thus let Mr. Simon give away twice as much as he
otherwise might. All he had to do was deposit his money with New Era for
six months.
Though a double-your-money offer in which the contributor must turn
over funds has all the earmarks of a common fraud, Mr. Simon wrote out
five checks to New Era, totaling more than $3.2 million, between January
and May of this year. It turned out that the matching donors didn’t
exist, and Mr. Simon is currently among hundreds of individuals and
organizations waiting in line in bankruptcy court to get at least some
of their money back.
Mr. Simon participated without personally examining the foundation’s
financial records because, he says, he trusted Mr. Bennett, who appeared
to share Mr. Simon’s religious convictions and devotion to good works.
Moreover, several other friends of Mr. Simon in the world of
philanthropy and finance were signing on as well. But for Mr. Simon, the
New Era fiasco wasn’t an isolated misjudgment.
Seven years earlier, Mr. Simon had invested $5 million in
Hedged-Investments Associates, a Denver-based fund, even though it never
provided investors with audited financial statements. Like Mr. Bennett,
James C. Donahue, the fund’s manager, presented himself as deeply
religious. Although Mr. Simon withdrew his money before the fund
collapsed in 1990 amid allegations that so-called profits were coming
from the contributions of other investors, a bankruptcy trustee is still
trying to get him to return any phony profits he may have derived. (A
lower court has supported Mr. Simon’s contention that he owes nothing;
the case is on appeal.)
Though these two Ponzi schemes are surely the biggest financial
embarrassments of Mr. Simon’s career, they come in the context of a
broader record of surprisingly lackluster investments in thrifts and
real estate in the past decade. Considering this performance — which
may even have reduced his net worth — why does Mr. Simon have a
reputation as one of the great investors of our time? In a word, Wesray.
This was the pioneering leveraged-buyout company Mr. Simon founded
with Raymond G. Chambers in 1981. By demonstrating that investors could
make vast profits by acquiring divisions of large conglomerates and
enhancing their efficiency, Wesray Corp. helped alter the basic ground
rules of American business. It also made Mr. Simon fabulously wealthy.
In its most celebrated transaction, Wesray paid $80.5 million to
purchase Gibson Greetings Inc. from RCA Corp. in January 1982. Messrs.
Simon and Chambers together are believed to have put up just $1 million
of the purchase price, borrowing the rest. When they took Gibson public
at a valuation of $290 million in May 1983, each man pocketed about $70
million.
“It was really unbelievable. It was a phenomenon,” Mr. Simon recalls
with a broad grin. According to an estimate by Mr. Chambers that
reflects only some of the deals, the two partners earned a combined $300
million from Wesray. Mr. Simon, interviewed at his sprawling East
Hampton, N. Y., summer home last month, wouldn’t comment on the amount.
But since the partnership came apart in 1986 amid recriminations
between the two founders, Mr. Simon has been unable to recreate anything
like Wesray’s glory days, despite his extensive resources and
still-impressive energy and drive.
Not that he hasn’t tried. After leaving Wesray, Mr. Simon first set
his sights on the Pacific Rim, publicly predicting that he would
assemble a business empire akin to the great trading houses described in
James Clavell’s “Noble House.” Forging a new partnership, this time with
Gerald L. Parsky, a Los Angeles attorney who had worked for him as an
assistant Treasury secretary, Mr. Simon pursued his pan-Pacific vision
by acquiring several troubled savings-and-loan associations and a small
bank.
Mr. Simon said at the time that the thrifts would be the foundation
for a giant merchant bank. But it was apparent from the start that some
of the elements that made Wesray so successful couldn’t be replicated.
For one thing, while Wesray was able to finance almost all its
acquisitions with money from large U.S. financial institutions, Mr.
Simon now had to put up his own money and attract funds from other
individuals. These included members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family, who
remembered Mr. Simon’s role as the U.S. “energy czar” during the oil
embargo in 1973.
—
Mr. Simon’s Pacific strategy never really got off the ground. He and
Mr. Parsky earned a multimillion-dollar profit from the purchase and
sale of two Hawaiian financial institutions but, in 1991, Mr. Simon sent
Mr. Parsky a one-page fax announcing that he was quitting the
partnership. Although Messrs. Simon and Parsky have never fully
explained the reason for the break, former colleagues suggest it
involved personality clashes and Mr. Simon’s desire to increase the
involvement of his two sons, William E. Simon Jr. and J. Peter Simon.
Mr. Simon purchased Mr. Parsky’s interests in the remaining financial
institutions and, in October 1991, he and Bill Simon Jr. set up offices
in the Marina Del Rey, Calif., headquarters of one of the thrifts,
Western Federal Savings & Loan. But despite the Simons’ involvement in
its management, Western was seized by federal authorities in 1993
because of what the authorities said was its inadequate capital base.
Mr. Simon declines to comment on published reports that he lost $40
million on Western, but at the time of the seizure Bill Simon Jr. said
the family had lost what he called a “substantial capital investment.”
The three Simons, whose company William E. Simon & Sons now has about
55 employees in Morristown, N. J., Los Angeles and Hong Kong, kept
substantial stakes in three other California institutions, but these
haven’t shown promise as building blocks for any kind of financial
empire.
World Trade Bank, a single-branch company located in Beverly Hills,
has lost money in each of the past three years, including $2.8 million
in 1994, according to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. documents. Its
capital base is so marginal that it is subject to a consent decree with
the Comptroller of the Currency limiting the bank’s growth. The Simons
recently agreed to merge World Trade with another small financial
institution, in a deal that would leave the family with a 20% interest
in the new company.
The situation is even more dire at Southern California Federal
Savings & Loan, a $1.7 billion institution also based in Beverly Hills.
SoCal lost $49.1 million last year, according to Office of Thrift
Supervision records. As of the end of March, the federal agency
considered SoCal “critically undercapitalized.” In June, Mr. Simon
arranged a $60 million capital infusion, the bulk of it from the Bishop
Estate, a richly endowed Hawaiian trust, says Preston Martin, a Simon
associate who served as SoCal’s chairman until he was removed at the
time of the infusion. Mr. Martin says that Bishop has now displaced Mr.
Simon as SoCal’s controlling shareholder.
Mr. Simon acknowledges that the thrift investments have been
unsuccessful, but he now dismisses the importance of the companies he
once predicted would grow into a great financial empire, calling them
“those peanut little things.” As for the family’s losses, Bill Simon Jr.
says, “It’s not as bad as it has been reported.” In fact, he says, when
all the pluses and minuses are tallied, the family’s loss stands at just
$7 million — “not a lot compared to our portfolio.”
The elder Mr. Simon blames the losses on federal increases in the
capital requirements of his thrifts in violation, he says, of agreements
he made with the government when he made the acquisitions. (An Office of
Thrift Supervision spokesman declines to comment, citing pending
litigation.) Analysts agree that rule changes were partly responsible
for the state of Mr. Simon’s thrifts. But they say that his timing —
considered a strong suit during Mr. Simon’s Wesray years — was also
unfortunate: “Southern California has been disastrous over the past few
years,” says Gareth Plank, a San Francisco-based thrift analyst with
Rodman & Renshaw Inc.
—
Real-estate development, another key component of Mr. Simon’s
business, also has proved disappointing. In 1987, his company purchased
an interest in The Hills, an 1,800-acre development that stretches
across two New Jersey townships, Bedminster and Bernards. The project,
of which about 3,300 of 5,200 planned units have been completed, is
believed to be New Jersey’s largest planned-community development.
The Simons originally paid about $6 million to purchase a 12.5%
interest in the development, according to Peter Simon, who adds, “We
were involved in a very strong market at the time.” Saying his father
thought the cash investment would be limited to the purchase price,
Peter Simon adds: “It was supposed to be an annuity.”
Instead, the real-estate market collapsed soon after the purchase.
When commercial banks virtually ceased making real-estate loans, the
Simons and their partners in the project had to come up with millions of
dollars in cash to cover the cost of developing the site. Peter Simon,
who says the family now owns 33% of the development and has lent money
to one of the other partners to cover his share of the costs, laments,
“We’ve been writing checks because no one would lend.”
At this point, Peter Simon says, the family’s stake is “multiples” of
the original purchase price. “It’s a very large investment for us,” he
says.
Here again, the elder Mr. Simon’s timing has been problematic. He
invested in the property near the peak of the 1980s real-estate boom,
New Jersey developers say. John Kerwin, president of Hills Development
Co. until Mr. Simon replaced him in 1992, says residential sales at The
Hills — about $100 million in both 1986 and 1987 — dipped to about $40
million in both 1990 and 1991 as New Jersey’s recession turned into a
real-estate-industry depression. The business has yet to recover: Peter
Simon expects sales to run about $50 million this year.
The Hills could ultimately prove to be a profitable enterprise, but
at this point Peter Simon calls it “a very difficult investment,”
adding: “When I get a call from The Hills, it’s because they have a
problem — and it usually means they want cash.”
Mr. Simon has done better with a throwback to his early years as a
municipal-bond trader: William E. Simon & Sons Municipal Securities, a
modest-sized municipal-bond trading and underwriting company based in
Morristown. A brochure says the firm, which has 27 professionals and is
56% owned by the family, trades about $2 billion in bonds every month.
Mr. Simon says the firm, with $10 million in capital, has been solidly
profitable ever since it opened for business in 1990.
Mr. Simon also has investments in a wide array of companies that he
and his sons don’t actively manage. According to a brochure provided by
Mr. Simon, they include a group of Southern radio stations; Brothers
Gourmet Coffees Inc., a coffee wholesaler and retailer; Premium Holdings
Corp., one of the Midwest’s biggest hog producers; Atlantic Greenhouses
Inc., a group of floral greenhouses in the eastern U.S. ; Allied Waste
Industries Inc., a garbage-management company; Andrew M. Carter & Co., a
Boston-based bond investment firm; and a Washington-based restaurant
chain called La Madeleine Inc.
Also, the Simons’ Hong Kong office, which was launched in 1991 in
partnership with Indonesia’s wealthy Bakrie family, has acquired
interests in a shipping company and an eyeglass manufacturer. Mr. Simon,
who plans to visit Hong Kong this fall, says the shipping company has
been steadily profitable. The Asian office is currently attempting to
raise a $200 million investment fund, in which the Government of
Singapore Investment Corp. has agreed to invest $50 million, according
to a prospectus.
Because most of these companies are private — and the Simons won’t
discuss the bottom line — it is difficult to make an independent
judgment on the profitability of the family holdings. However, it is
known that at least one company that was not listed in the Simons’
brochure has been unsuccessful: Weintraub Entertainment Group, an
independent Los Angeles film-production company that filed for Chapter
11 bankruptcy-court protection in 1990. Mr. Simon dismisses the loss
with a shrug: “It’s like drilling oil wells. I put in $750,000 or $1
million, and they went a full year without hitting anything. It’s pretty
small in the scheme of things.”
More generally, some observers say, Mr. Simon’s prospects are hurt by
the very diversity of his investments. Indeed, one former executive of
William E. Simon & Sons says he left the firm for this reason. “By and
large, Bill’s investing hasn’t taken on any particular theme in the last
five or six years,” this former executive says. “Firms that have the
best returns are the ones that have the most focus. You can only be an
authority on so many kinds of deals and industries.”
Actually, Peter Simon says about half the family’s money is invested
through a group of 30 outside investment managers. Mr. Simon
acknowledges that many financial experts would criticize such a
far-flung approach as inviting mediocrity. However, he says his money
managers have outperformed the market over the past seven years and he
believes they will continue to do so.
Still, in evaluating the Simons’ finances, some observers —
including Forbes magazine, which attempts to rank the 400 wealthiest
Americans — believe Mr. Simon’s wealth has declined since the Wesray
years. In 1989 and 1990, Forbes included Mr. Simon on its “rich list,”
estimating his net worth at $300 million. But the magazine dropped him
in 1993, citing “bad investments.”
—
The recent string of apparently unspectacular investments in thrifts
and real estate has even caused some to reassess what really went into
Wesray’s undeniable success; one revisionist point of view holds that
the leveraged-buyout triumphs may have owed less to Mr. Simon’s good
judgment and connections than to Mr. Chambers’s business savvy.
“Simon hasn’t done anything substantial since he broke up with Ray
Chambers,” says Gerard L. Smith, an investment banker who until recently
was co-head of mergers and acquisitions at Salomon Brothers and who
advised Mr. Simon on several potential California thrift acquisitions.
“He’s trying to prove to the world that Chambers wasn’t the reason that
Wesray was so successful, but he was,” Mr. Smith adds.
Mr. Chambers, who now devotes most of his time to charitable
activities, declined to be interviewed for this article. But in an angry
letter to Mr. Simon that preceded their breakup by about a year, he
suggested that he considered himself to be the crucial, unrecognized
force behind Wesray’s success. “I never minded `being in the trenches’
and being responsible for getting the deals done and then making them
work,” he wrote. “I’m the man who has been sincerely content to stay in
your shadow and let you have the Wesray limelight.”
Mr. Simon asserts that his own vision and his ability to open doors
were essential to the success of Wesray. Still, it now appears that, at
the very least, the company’s triumph was more a collaboration than it
was billed as at the time, when Mr. Simon was the public face of the
operation.
Wesray also illustrates Mr. Simon’s long-term difficulty maintaining
good relations with partners and employees. According to Mr. Chambers’s
letter in November 1985, the two men had just had an argument over Mr.
Chambers’s request that Mr. Simon treat Wesray employees more kindly.
The letter suggests that Wesray’s breakup came as a result of Mr.
Chambers’s unhappiness with Mr. Simon. “After our distasteful
`conversation’ of Friday, I don’t think it would be fruitful to continue
our relationship in its present form,” Mr. Chambers wrote. “I suggest
that we either liquidate Wesray or reconstitute it.”
Mr. Simon says the end of the era of wildly profitable leveraged
buyouts, rather than any personality clash, caused Wesray to break up.
Of the letter, he says, “That’s under the heading of nitpicking.”
In any case, the letter seems to confirm what Mr. Simon’s friends and
critics say is his most unattractive feature — the way he treats
business colleagues. Secretaries are frequent victims. When one of them
botches a telephone message or some logistical arrangement, Mr. Simon,
who is fanatical about returning phone calls and letters, sometimes
reacts explosively. Mr. Simon admits he has a hot temper, although he
says it is never malicious. “There isn’t enough time for niceties,” he
says. “I’m impatient.”
Barbara Jensen, who was Mr. Simon’s lead secretary for 23 years until
she retired in 1989, says the main problem is Mr. Simon’s absolute
intolerance of delay. “He has no patience, none at all. It’s
unbelievable,” she says. “If everything is running all right, he’s fine;
but if he thinks you’re not doing your job, he’s a bear.” Noting that
many of Mr. Simon’s secretaries don’t last long, she adds: “He hollers a
lot. If you take it to heart, you’re in trouble.”
A prominent businessman who sat on Citicorp’s board of directors at
the same time as Mr. Simon and considers him a personal friend says Mr.
Simon’s habit of telephoning repeatedly before the other person has a
chance to call back is annoying. He also says Mr. Simon’s outbursts, far
from being limited to low-level staffers, reached into Citicorp’s
boardroom: “When things don’t go the way they should, Bill is very quick
to let people know what he thinks. His interpersonal skills have
suffered.”
The chief executive of a New York investment-banking company who also
considers Mr. Simon to be a friend says, “I like him, but he’s a very
difficult guy. Anyone who has a reputation for being difficult gives you
pause.”
Mr. Simon also suffers lingering resentment from some of the people
he encouraged to invest in exploratory oil wells in the late 1970s.
These investors say Mr. Simon didn’t inform them that he was receiving
ownership interests in successful wells, in apparent compensation for
bringing them into the deals. When the operation collapsed in 1985, some
investors considered, but rejected, the possibility of suing Mr. Simon
for failing to disclose his separate deal. (Mr. Simon admits he should
have done a better job of disclosing his deal, though he says it was
legitimate.) Still, the incident isn’t forgotten, says one of the
investors, John Zenko, who runs a Chicago-based publishing business:
“People think he’s an edge player. I don’t think he’s a crook; he’s an
alley cat.”
—
Yet there’s a warmer side to Mr. Simon that enables many of his
colleagues to forgive his rough edges. Whatever strain existed between
Messrs. Simon and Chambers in the mid-1980s seems to have disappeared
since then. The two men co-own the building in Morristown from which Mr.
Chambers runs his family foundation and Mr. Simon manages his company.
Mr. Simon, who says he generally sees Mr. Chambers once a week,
describes him as a “great friend.”
Despite his difficult reputation, Mr. Simon considers himself a
highly principled man with a strong spirit of generosity — and is
viewed this way by many friends and colleagues. Says longtime employee
Mrs. Jensen, “The truth is he is a teddy bear.”
“He doesn’t like being the person people think he is,” says Mary Pat
Fortier, another former longtime secretary who now considers Mr. Simon
to be a friend. Although she says he is a “taskmaster,” she also says he
takes it upon himself to make thoughtful gestures, big and small. When
he heard of the death of a dog belonging to one of the John M. Olin
Foundation’s secretaries, Mrs. Fortier says, he bought her a new one.
Mr. Simon has been president of the conservative foundation for almost
two decades; the 26-page biography his office distributes overflows with
foundation and charitable fund-raising work.
“I’m an interesting study, no doubt about that,” Mr. Simon says with
a kind of bemused detachment. “I’m tough, I’m hard-driving, I have a
temper, some people think I’m arrogant. Some of that is true, but I also
know that I’ve helped a lot of people.”
For more than a decade, he says, he and his family (he has seven
children) spent part of every Christmas Day at Covenant House, a home
for troubled children in New York City, distributing presents and
serving food. More recently, he says, the family has been making
Christmas Day visits to a number of hospitals.
Mr. Simon, a Catholic, says his religious commitment grew after he
made a pilgrimage to the French town of Lourdes, the location of an
important shrine, in 1992. “He had an experience there, and it changed
his life,” says the Rev. Maurice Chase, a Los Angeles priest who has
gone to Lourdes with Mr. Simon. “It really hit him.” Mr. Simon says he
plans to go to Lourdes every year for the rest of his life. Like other
modern-day pilgrims, he works as a “helper,” assisting sick and
handicapped pilgrims attend Mass and processions and enter a large stone
bath that contains “Lourdes water.”
A few months after his first trip to Lourdes, Mr. Simon began working
as a Eucharistic minister, serving Communion to patients at three New
York-area hospitals, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Morristown
Memorial Hospital and the Terence Cardinal Cooke Healthcare Center in
East Harlem. Jennifer Grey, an official at the Cardinal Cooke Center,
says Mr. Simon was the first volunteer to ask to work in its 150-bed
ward for AIDS patients, where he now spends about four hours every
couple of weeks. “He doesn’t just give Communion,” Ms. Grey says. “Some
people spend just a few minutes and move on, but he really spends time.
He’s truly a comfort.”
At the same time, Mr. Simon seems to have become less involved in the
details of his business life. Though in the early years Mr. Simon
exercised tight control over his family investment firm, his sons now
play a more substantial role. “Dad’s desire to know all the details has
diminished very substantially,” Peter Simon says.
Yet the elder Mr. Simon’s longtime passion for nautical adventures
remains intense — his 175-foot luxury yacht Itasca took him close to
both of the Earth’s poles last year. And his love of politics hasn’t
waned either. Having kept in touch with prominent Republicans over the
years, Mr. Simon says a number of people have asked him to re-enter the
political arena by running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by
Bill Bradley.
Mr. Simon says his wife, Carol, who died of cancer in June, was the
main reason he didn’t run for office in the past, and he admits to being
intrigued by the idea. Mr. Simon is an advocate of reduced government,
diminished deficits and a flat tax, causes he has been trumpeting for
more than 20 years.
“I don’t want to say I’m considering” running for the Senate, he
says, “but I’m not ruling anything out either.”
On one point, though, he says he is certain: “I am going to do one
more big thing in my life.”
DMS Financial
DIN Diversified Financial Services; Real Estate Investments; Savings &
Loans, Thrifts
DNS Bankruptcy; Biography; Community Groups & Charities; Front-Page Stories
DRE California; Far East; Hong Kong; New Jersey; North America; Pacific Rim;
United States; Eastern U.S. ; Western U.S.
DJN Page One Umbrella; Right Leader

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the
personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the
hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering
from the HIV/AIDS and others who are seeking to help them.]

In 1950, 1 in 5 Americans could expect to get cancer.
In 1970, the odds were 1 in 4. Now, they are 1 in 3, and
still rising. Since 1971, when President Nixon declared the
“war on cancer,” Modern Medicine has spent over $35 billion
on cancer research and over $1 trillion on treatment. After
all that money, doctors still can’t sure cancer, and the
death rate is increasing. Is there something wrong with this
picture?

What causes cancer? The same things that cause any
disease: poor nutrition, toxic buildup, stress, and lack of
exercise. Virtually all Americans are short essential
nutrients. This causes metabolic imbalances and lowers
overall resistance to disease. Toxins can trigger cancer by
damaging DNA while suppressing the immune system. Suboptimal
nutrition and toxic buildup have made cancer the leading
cause of death for children. The average American child, by
the time they reach the age of five, has already
bioaccumulated the maximum allowable lifetime-dose of five
categories of carcinogens. Stress can suppress the immune
system, making the host more vulnerable to infections and
cancer. Exercise is essential to good health, but most
Americans are sedentary. While 1 out of 3 Americans will get
cancer, only 1 out of 7 physically active people will get
cancer.

How do you prevent cancer? First of all, eat a good
diet and take high quality nutritional supplements. The
problem is very few people make the effort to learn how to
get good nutrition. Avoid environmental toxins. About 80% of
the average person’s pesticide load comes from meat and
dairy, so stop eating them. Don’t take recreational or
prescription drugs. Take up meditation or some other daily
stress reduction technique. Get plenty of regular exercise.
Avoid electromagnetic stress. Don’t keep an electric clock
near your bed. Don’t live near high voltage power lines or
transformers. Don’t use electric blankets, hair dryers,
etc.

How do you cure cancer? Modern Medicine treats cancer
with surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. Surgery removes
essential body tissue, and lowers overall competence.
Chemotherapy destroys the immune system, and increases risk
of death from infections and other cancers. Radiation is
known to cause cancer. What is singularly lacking is any
effort to rebuild the body’s own immune defense and repair
systems. For example, a zinc deficiency lowers immune
competence, and over the long-term can cause cancer. Zinc
supplementation is therefore essential to reversing the
cancer, but it’s not part of conventional treatment.
Incidentally, most Americans are zinc deficient because our
soils have been depleted of this mineral.

A study was done on 200 cancer patients who had
experienced “spontaneous remission.” Doctors call these
remissions “miracles.” They’re NOT miracles. Here’s how
they did it. Eighty seven percent of them fundamentally
changed their diets – mostly to vegetarian. All of the 200
made changes in their lives including nutritional
supplementation and detoxification techniques. What this
and other studies are telling us is that cancer can be cured
by fundamentally changing the chemistry that created it.
In addition to eating a good diet, reducing toxic
loads, reducing stress, and getting exercise, there are
supplements that are known to help reverse cancer. These
are: potassium, vitamin C, beta-carotene vitamin E,
quercitin, zinc, vitamin B-6, essential fatty acids [such as
borage, flax seed and evening primrose oils], and coenzyme
Q10. There are anticancer agents in foods like garlic,
seaweed, tomatoes, dark leafy vegetables, and cruciferous
vegetables like broccoli and cabbage. Herbs such as Essiac
tea, Jason Winters tea, Pau D’ Arco tea, Astragalas,
Siberian Ginsing, and Ginkgo biloba have also shown
anticancer activity.

On the bottom line, virtually any disease can be
reversed by correcting the metabolic imbalances which caused
the problem. For the most part, health is a choice. By
making right choices, we can both prevent and cure disease –
including cancer.

Copyright 1995, Raymond Francis

[Raymond Francis is an M.I.T.-trained scientist who has
spent the last nine years researching cellular biochemistry.
He is an internationally known health expert.

One final note: My good friend Brian Coyle–quoted in the
book “Why We Will Never Win The War On AIDS” by
Duesberg/Ellison–has lived 12 years with an “AIDS”
diagnosis. Brian is doing well. All of the health tips
mentioned in the above article have been regularly utilized
by Brian. He is living proof that what Francis recommends
truly does work.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National AIDS
Clearinghouse makes available the following information as a public
service only. Providing this information does not constitute endorsement
by the CDC, the CDC Clearinghouse, or any other organization. Reproduction
of this text is encouraged; however, copies may not be sold, and the CDC
Clearinghouse should be cited as the source of this information.
Copyright 1994, Information, Inc., Bethesda, MD

“Lifeline: Cause Celeb”
USA Today (10/21/94) P. 1D; Vigoda, Arlene
On Dec. 21–World AIDS Day–20 country music stars will
participate in a benefit concert for a Nashville AIDS
organization. Scheduled to perform at the event, being held at
the Grand Ole Opry House, are Kathy Mattea, Billy Ray Cyrus, the
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, David Ball, and others. Tickets for the
event will go on sale Oct. 29.

“Deaths: Cleews Vellay”
Washington Post (10/21/94) P. D5
Cleews Vellay, a cofounder and former president of the French
branch of ACT UP, died of AIDS on Oct. 18 in Paris. Vellay
lobbied to raise public awareness of AIDS-related problems that
AIDS patients experience. He also condemned the French
government for laxity in developing AIDS prevention and education
programs. Related Story: Philadelphia Inquirer (10/21) P. B7

“Poverty Increases Risk of Death from AIDS–Study”
Reuters (10/21/94)
A Canadian study has found that poverty reduces the survival rate
of AIDS patients. Professor Martin Schechter of the University
of British Columbia in Vancouver led a research team that
followed the lives of 364 gay men for 10 years beginning in
November 1982. “Men on low incomes had a 63 percent greater
chance of death from AIDS by December 1993 (the end of the study)
than those on higher incomes,” said the study. Low income was
defined as less than US$7,500 a year. The study offered no
conclusions as to why low-income patients may be more susceptible
to death, but suggested that nutrition may be partially
responsible.

“Massie a Hit at HIV Conference with Lessons of Being Positive”
Boston Globe (10/20/94) P. 38; Howe, Peter
Robert K. Massie, the Democratic candidate for lieutenant
governor of Massachusetts, discussed his struggle with hemophilia
and HIV on Wednesday at a meeting of the AIDS Action Committee.
Massie received sustained applause and support when introduced as
the first HIV-positive person in the country to run for a
statewide office. “I step forward because I am proud of my life
and all the help that I have received from others and what I have
become as a result…,” said Massie. He has frequently spoken
during his campaign about the spiritual and practical lessons of
HIV. Robert Greenwald, director of public policy for the
committee, said that one of the reasons that Massie is an
inspiration to Massachusetts residents with HIV or AIDS is
because of “the fact that he is a person with HIV is not central
to his campaign.”

“Agouron Begins Clinical Testing of Anti-HIV Drug”
PR Newswire (10/20/94)
Agouron Pharmaceuticals Inc. has started human clinical trials of
AG1343, its anti-HIV drug. The safety and pharmocokinetic
parameters of single and multiple oral doses of the drug will be
assessed in phase I studies during the next 60 days. AG1343
demonstrated potent inhibition of HIV replication in vitro in
preclinical trials. “If AG1343 displays the same pharmacological
profile in humans that it has in test animals, this compound
could ultimately play an important role in anti-HIV
chemotherapy,” said Peter Johnson, president and chief executive
officer of Agouron. AG1343 is a synthetic compound engineered to
inhibit HIV protease–a key enzyme in the replication of
infectious HIV particles.

“Trinity Biotech PLC Reports 6 Month Financial Results”
PR Newswire (10/20/94)
Trinity Biotech plc, an Ireland-based diagnostics company, has
reported more than a 30-fold increase in both its second quarter
and half-year revenues over the same periods in fiscal year 1993.
“Revenues continue to be derived chiefly from pregnancy sales,
but HIV test sales are now coming on stream,” said CEO, Ronan
O’Caoimh. The company is also involved in the development of a
new single-step HIV test.

“Soap Summit to Discuss Development of Storylines Affecting U.S.
Attitudes Toward Reproductive Behavior”
PR Newswire (10/20/94)
The first “Soap Summit,” sponsored by Population Communications
International, will feature discussion on how to incorporate
American attitudes toward reproductive behavior into the plots of
soap operas. More than 45 leading health experts, television
executives, and top soap opera creative talents will attend the
meeting. Global and U.S. population issues will be addressed, as
well as the role of television soaps in influencing reproductive
behavior. Dr. Bradley Greenberg, professor of Telecommunications
and Communications at Michigan State University, will discuss
whether and how five soaps that he studied deal with reproductive
issues–including safe sex and AIDS. His findings will be
compared to the results of a similar study conducted 10 years
ago.

“Assisted Suicide Court Battles Intensify”
Reuters (10/19/94); Appleson, Gail
Lawyers in New York on Wednesday urged U.S. District Court Judge
Thomas Griesa to overturn the state’s ban on doctor-assisted
suicide. The suit–funded by Compassion in Dying–was filed on
behalf of three people with AIDS, two of whom have already died.
Compassion in Dying claims the ban is unconstitutional, and
alleges that the law denies people “the liberty and privacy to
decide what to do with their own bodies and forces them to endure
pain, anguish and loss of dignity.” The organization provides
advice to people who wish to commit suicide; Instead of
administering lethal drugs, however, they refer the individuals
to doctors for prescriptions of drugs that can be fatal when
taken in large doses. Approximately 30 states have laws that
prohibit assisted suicide.

“Homosexuality”
New England Journal of Medicine (10/06/94) Vol. 331, No. 14, P.
923; Friedman, Richard C.; Downey, Jennifer I.
Although the AIDS epidemic is not confined to homosexuals, it has
increased the stigmatization of gay men because they account for
such a large number of AIDS cases in the United States. The
epidemic has also intensified stigma against lesbians –who
actually are at no increased risk of AIDS, but are often assumed
to be at high risk because they are homosexual. Homosexuals that
have AIDS are often discriminated against by employers, social
service agencies, insurance carriers, and health care providers.
Fear of homophobia and stigmatization may lead a homosexual who
is HIV-positive or being tested for HIV to internalize negative
attitudes and isolate himself or herself from others. While one
showed an increased frequency in the rate of completed suicides
among gay men with AIDS, studies of people with AIDS and those
tested for HIV have not demonstrated an increase in suicidality.
HIV-positive individuals often cope with the disease by remaining
involved in life’s activities, keeping in touch with others, and
maintaining hope.

“Gene Therapy Leaves the Lab, Faces Big Hurdles in the Clinic”
AIDS Alert (10/94) Vol. 9, No. 10, P. 140
Researchers in gene therapy are initiating small trials in mice
and humans that could yield a new approach to fighting HIV by
boosting or possibly restoring the immune system. Researchers at
the University of Washington have been encouraged by the
reconstituted immune systems in patients given escalating doses
of CD8 T cell clones and by the fact that none of the patients
developed life-threatening cytomegalovirus. A University of
California at San Diego-developed and FDA-approved process for an
ex vivo Phase I clinical trial uses a ribosome molecule derived
from the tobacco ringspot virus. Designed to resemble antisense
RNA, the ribosome has been shown in vitro to inactivate HIV
expression in target cells, resulting in an antiviral effect.
Finally, researchers at the University of California in Los
Angeles have found a way to test the safety and validity of
treatments by introducing genetically altered human cells into
mice. It was determined that mice infected with HIV showed a
decline in human immune cells implanted into their system. By
using the animal model, tests of gene therapies can be performed
in as little as three months and the mice may be used in gene
therapy tests for other diseases.